I occasionally re-think my arrangement of automated backups. Recent reading about somebody else’s backup method inspired me to take better care of backups (yet again). I used to have 40 GB mirrors in 3 separate sites, which seemed beyond sufficient. Nevertheless, last Tuesday I bought a 300GB external hard-drive. Unwrapped, connected to SuSE and voila! New drive appears on Desktop. Linux has become easier than ever before. Almost frustratingly easy as there is no challenge and rarely a need to install any software.

The only downside of this device is the noise level, which is resulted from rotation at 7200 RPM inside relatively small housing. This can become loud and persistent during overnight baskups. Since the noise bothers me, I suppose could rely on earplugs. The internal hard-drive on the actual box probably has greater noise levels than the new external unit. Usually, however, it is idle or asleep, so only noise from the fan is a true factor.

I never lethargically back up my hard-drives, but nightime appears to be a must for backups, owing to (to put negatively — due to) duration. Matters used to be worse if defragging hard-drives, back in the days when I had a Windows laptop in my apartment. It required some overnight maintenance jobs and fortunately no such issues exist with Linux. Backups, on the contrary, become larger and larger (thus taking longer to complete).

All in all, I have 300 vacant gigabytes to fill. But where will I ever find that much pr0n? I kid, I kid. [smile /]

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Hardware, Raves, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.