Marc Kelly said the following on 26/02/2009 12:01:
robert fallis wrote:
I've just had a major crash, reinstalled now,but lost a lot of data.
I'm thinking of putting my Data on to an external hard dive, in the hope
that it will not be lost, Will this work? and is thier anything I should
be aware of in doing?
My only point is be aware some of the smaller 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 inch ones
claim to power from the USB.. by using a Y splitting USB cable for extra
current, I have seen those do weird things under heavy use.
I back up to one and on some systems the USB won't provide the juice all
the time under heavy load. Caused it to vanish from USB bus, and
reappear moments later. Use external power, all is fine.
Ditto on the USB power problems, especially with laptops,
desktops are generally ok. The cute little 8x10 cm, 150gram
ones are only USB powered. If you're backing up a desktop
machine and don't need the disk to be very portable get the
big ones using external power. (Not as green, of course.)
BEWARE - it's no longer true that they come with FAT32 format
and will thus plug&play in Linux. Many of the new ones,
especially if they have 'automatic backup' or some such feature,
are now coming NTFS formatted and may not be recognized.
I had one that I had to do a 2 stage reformat on.
The really annoying thing is that the web sites selling
them virtually never say anything about the formatting.
To use properly for full backup in Linux you should reformat
to ext3, but for storage of data that you might want to
share with Windows (eg. if you have dual boot) FAT32 is best.
Cheers, Jan