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External Hard Drive question

Donks

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I'm looking to buy an External HD for my laptop. I'm currently thinking of a Maxtor OneTouch FireWire and USB 250GB one.
Does anyone have any experience with it? Are there better choices out there for a similar price? Will it run on a linux machine (I dualboot Debian and WinXP)?

Thanks
 
You can buy a 250gb harddrive for about 180 dollars now, and an external USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure for 20 dollars. If your drive costs more than 200, I'd recommend going the enclosure route. That way, you can always just install the harddrive internally if you want, or you can put something else in the external enclosure.
 
Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the tip, I'll check that out.
 
Donks said:
I'm looking to buy an External HD for my laptop. I'm currently thinking of a Maxtor OneTouch FireWire and USB 250GB one.
Does anyone have any experience with it? Are there better choices out there for a similar price? Will it run on a linux machine (I dualboot Debian and WinXP)?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I use exactly that drive to backup my laptop.

I never got the onetouch thing working. However the retrospect express software it comes with seems to do a pretty good job of backing up (though I've not yet had to use it in an emergency...)

I use the firewire. The USB port at the back is a funny connector - not the flat sort you normally see on a computer...
 
A while back, I bought a big plastic USB2 enclosure and stuffed a 250GB drive in it for around $200. It's so trivial, even novices at hardware stuff should be able to do it. Plug it in, format it, you're ready to go.

Beware of what you purchase on-line, however. Many of the very cheap enclosures are for 2.5" drives. This is fine if you want to be able to use the drive on the road; just ensure it doesn't need a power adapter (USB Powered). The pocket drives cost about twice as much for the same capacity, and only go up to 80GB, but they're very small and convenient.

If you buy one pre-assembled, you'll probably get a very noisy drive, lousy drive packed in the box to move it out the door. Go for a Maxtor. They're reasonably quiet, durable and cheap. Generally a 5400 RPM drive will be quieter than a 7200 RPM, and it will be less likely to cook in a case that doesn't have a (noisy) fan in it.

I use a batch to do my backups.

Code: 
set mflags=/MIR /xo /R:0 
set aflags=/E /xo /R:0 
set dst=k:
set mirror=%dst%\Backup\Mirror
set archive=%dst%\Backup\Archive
set recover=%dst%\Backup\Recovery

@echo Recovery Backups
robocopy %aflags% "F:\Recovery" %recover%
robocopy %aflags% "C:\Config" %recover%\Config
robocopy %mflags% "C:\Documents and Settings\evildave" "%recover%\evildave"

@echo Mirror Backups
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CVS" %mirror%\CVS
robocopy %mflags% "D:\My Documents" "%mirror%\My Documents"
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Mail" %mirror%\Mail
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Work" %mirror%\Work
robocopy %mflags% "D:\SourceForge" %mirror%\SourceForge
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Jakks" %mirror%\Jakks

@echo Mirror Other Junk
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Games" %mirror%\Games
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CD-IMAGE" %mirror%\CD-IMAGE
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Download" %mirror%\Download
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Movies" %mirror%\Movies
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Music" %mirror%\Music

@echo Archive Backups
robocopy %aflags% "E:\CVS" %archive%\CVS
robocopy %aflags% "D:\My Documents" "%archive%\My Documents"
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Work" %archive%\Work
robocopy %aflags% "D:\SourceForge" %archive%\SourceForge
robocopy %aflags% "F:\OldWork" %archive%\OldWork
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Jakks" %archive%\Jakks
echo.
echo.
@echo Backup VMWare data?
pause
robocopy %mflags% "D:\VMWare" %mirror%\VMWare

The backup ran in less time than it took to compose this post, even though I haven't run it in a couple of weeks (naughty me!).

In any event, if you take your notebook on the road a lot, I recommend you avoid storing any particularly sensitive information on it. You can always plug it into the brick at home to manage your finances and such.
 
Thanks for the tips.
I'll hit the shops on Saturday and see what kind of enclosures I can find. If I can find a HD/enclosure combo I'm happy with, I'l probably go that route. If not, then Maxtor it is.

Now regarding partitioning. My current HD has 3 partitions: WinXP system (NTFS), Data (FAT32) and linux (ext3) (well, 4 partitions counting the linux swap).

My question is this: should I
a) leave the Data partition in my HD untouched,
b) reduce it in size and move most of my data to the external HD, or
c) move all of the data to the external and leave only the system partitions and the linux swap in the internal HD?
 
Usually you'll simply want to format the USB drive as one big NTFS partition, or maybe two (one with FAT32, one with NTFS), according to if you're going to have it readable by Win98/95 machines.

You'll want to assign the drive letter from
"Control Panel->System Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management" and deal with their clunky interface to ensure the external HDD is mapped to something predictable.

Generally, all you really want to do with the external hard drive is mirror stuff to it. The version on the computer is the "official" version, the version on the backup drive is "mirror".

I maintain a third "archive" category, that doesn't delete files that are deleted on the computer, in case mistakes have been made. These versions will still be overwritten on the external hard disk, but if you want to 'version' them, just rename the 'archive' folder with a date, and run the batch to create a fresh archive version.

If you move work or data to the hard drive to be worked on there, then THAT is the "official" version, and you must take steps to back that data up, as well. Either back to the computer, or to another backup device, such as another external hard disk.

My external hard disk spends most of its life "off", only occasionally being turned on to perform a backup (and rarely, but very significantly: a recovery).


Another little tip: XP has a System Restore 'rollback' feature. CONFIGURE THIS! The most important thing about this 'feature' is it will restore versions of everything, as of the date, and since the date that you rolled back to.

If this includes your WORK folders, you will get hundreds, even thousands of spammy names of files when you go back to a 'restore point', and your current work will be buried somewhere among these files!

Move your 'my documents' folder to a different partition than Windows, as well as any other work, and tell XP NOT to maintain system restore information for that volume. You're backing it all up seperately, after all.

It is quite handy on the Windows partition, as the built-in recovery relies on its existence, and it lets you (relatively painlessly) back out a lot of boo-boos with bad software and driver installations.
 
Cool, thanks for the tips. I ended up going for a Maxtor external. The choices available around here weren't that great and the price savings almost nil.
 
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