External Hard Disk Drives

[Name Trader]

I am not up to scratch with these devices. But it used to be they only worked with Windows computers. I'm using Linux on my laptop and I'd like to backup my internal hard disk drive, in case of disk drive failure or theft of the laptop. Are there any of these External Hard Disk Drives which run on Linux these days. Or alternatively are there any services which I can backup my hard disk on the internet?

 

[FPForum]

Here's a little article I found about a guy who uses a normal USD external drive to backup his Linux machine:
http://basicallytech.com/blog/index...xternal-hard-disk-for-backups-with-Linux.html

What distro are you running? Never tried this sort of thing before, but I would imagine it has to be possible some way.

 

[Deathstarr]

Hey Stub,

What distro are you using?

 

[Name Trader]

I run openSUSE. It was the most dissimilar (better than) OS/2 after I decided eComstation wasn't being updated in a professional manner. That was quite a few years ago now, of course. Most other distros looked like Windows / OS/2, yuk!
[rant]
I've never bought any Windows OS which wasn't delivered on a computer I bought. And then only for a short time, until I wiped it. Even with DOS (remember that) I always preferred IBMDOS to MSDOS. The only 2 windows I had any time for were XP and 7. The rest were all crap (imho) from beginning to the latest. The only advantage with Windows is the 3rd party software support. But openSUSE, even most distros, have all the major softwares covered these days or can run under a windows emulator
[/rant]

 

[Name Trader]

Thanks for the link FPForum. It looks like an extremely useful article.

 

[N-A]

A little boring, but interesting since you mentioned stolen property.

 

[warlov]

Search on youtube and you will find an answer to your problem!!

 

[Name Trader]

What distro are you using?

I use openSUSE. So many distros try to look like Windows (or did when I was researching which one to use, about 5 years ago). I like openSUSE for that and because of the strong backing.

 

[DU]

Look into Freenas. There's no reason for a external drive anymore when you can cloud it yourself.

Synology is expensive but pretty easy for non techies (it's what I went with because I'm lazy and was cost effective for me).

Or simply buy a drive and a hot back device (some fit in the 5.25 slot) and you can direct connect any drive...even old ones saved from old pcs.

I also stole the 3.25 drives from my laptops and replaced with high speed ssd drives. I bought a $10 case and USB connector and use them as external drives.

The nice thing about NAS is that you can version local files like with Dropbox and manage full incremental installs. You can even hook it up at a family members house to keep it remote if you can trust them to keep it connected (WOL supported).

Synology in RAID was best money I've spent on hardware recently. That's double protected right there

 

[DU]

With Linux your partitioning strategy should prevent the need for a full backup. No need to backup the distro really.


Don't use the common default....If you put things on separate drives you can plug and play much better.

 

[Hypersot]

Stub, a NAS is the solution to your problem. I have my NAS on a separate room in my house and that's where all my backups go from all the PCs in my network.

It is a great way for backups, p2p, and everything that needs to stay online when you leave your property without consuming loads of electricity.

Note also that most NAS' use RAID which saves you from the trouble of setting a raid on your main system

 

[Archana]

As you must know that Linux cannot read NTFS file system you must format your external hdd to ext3 format in order to use the same on linux distros