[plug] backing up Linux to Windows

[Chris Caston]

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 13:27, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Denis Brown wrote:
> 
> > Leon (and others) -- in your experience just how stable / reliable are 
> > the 200GB USB2 drives?   I have always been concerned about the physical 
> > handling side... drop a tape acidentally and no worries but drop a whole 
> > drive and Boom (tm).   Having said that one of my users here is doing 
> > just that on her WinXP machine and so far no tragedies.
> 
> We used to use 3 120GB hard disks as a rotating (HA! Geddit?) backup set.
> We picked up a cheap camera hard case, filled the inside with reasonably HD foam with cutouts for 
> two disks and used that to transport them offsite. 

This is a very good idea. I often provide a combination of ext HDs and
dvdrw to customers for inexpensive backup.

The one problem I sometimes come across though is a good file being
overwritten by a corrupt file when there is a hardware issue that causes
strange things to happen.

> One disk lived in the machine and we just brought 
> the case in twice a week to rotate the disks. I tested the case with a couple of shockwatch devices 
> and old dead hard disks and found that pretty much everything except throwing the case off the first 
> floor balcony was pretty much safeish. Not that I'd recommend that, but it was a fun test! It would 
> certainly survive being knocked off a desk or equivalent.
> 
> I recall in my younger days having a shiny new Syquest SyJet drive and about 4 disks to keep my 
> music backups on. I dropped one of the SyJet cartidges one day from about waist height and all the 
> data fell off. Not happy.
> Actually, that turned out to be a very expensive pig of a drive. Never again!
> 
> Brad