Hi,

I want to make sure I'm doing proper backups of my /home (well for both me and my partner). I already have a spare HDD and figured that an external case would do the trick - but I want to use an ethernet connection.

I have found a place that does them here. I'm looking to pay about the £50 mark, but when I check out the specifications I'm getting really confused.

They all mention either windows or windows/mac support. Which, if I understand correctly, might make a difference if I wanted to connect via USB, but as I want to use ethernet, does that matter ?

My system is too old/limited to make use of Firewire (there seems to be a number of these cases that connect with that) and only has USB 1.1 which would work, but I suspect only slowly.

Could I please ask if someone could have a quick look at the ones listed at about the £50 mark (or less ) and advise me as to whether these should work ok?

Currently running Kanotix 2005-04 (which is really debian testing/unstable).

many thanks in advance.

regards

John

I have never played with a network drive, so can't help you there but....

Backing up over my 10/100 ethernet is s-l-o-w: You have been warned!
Firewire is acceptably fast, I manage approx 0.8GB / min. PCI firewire cards are cheap.
Fastest, of course, is using an internal drive: Why don't you just mount your spare drive in your box?

HTH

Yes, I did think about doing that tredegar (putting the drive inside that is). Though it means a major system overhaul, because the second drive bay is obscured by the CPU and it's fan assembly (3 year old medion system).

With your firewire suggestion, well again, it's a system problem inasfaras, I've run out of PCI slots - I could really do with a new PC but moneys tight.

If backups over ethernet are slow, then I'll just do as I did when I was running Gentoo - do them (like I did when "emerging" any major packages) overnight. I just need to make sure that they're done.

I've ended up doing a bit of "suck it and see", and ordered one of these. I could also try a backup via USB, but as my system only has USB1.1 and I've run out of spare USB ports as well - I'd have to try both connections and see which is fastest. If the USB did prove the better option, then I'd have to unplug one of my regular peripherals do the backup and then reconnect the usual kit afterwards.

As I say, by overnighting the backup (hell, it gives me an excuse to actually learn about CRON) via ethernet, then it sort of "kills two birds, with one stone".

regards

John

That enclosure you have ordered looks very nice. I am envious!
It looks as though it runs an FTP server, amongst other neat things, so you should have no trouble getting it to work over your network with linux. What's the betting that it is running linux?
You might like to set the drive to a static IP address (I expect you can do this through its "Web based configuration") because if it uses DHCP you might find its address changes, which will break your cron jobs.
It looks like it only supports FAT32 (although I may be wrong), in which case you had better tar up your backups before saving them to the drive, or you will find your file permissions, groups and ownerships are lost when you try a restore.

Please let us know how you get on with it, and maybe post an entry in the HCL?

You may want to take a look at Sbackup,http://sbackup.sourceforge.net/HomePage.

SBackup is a simple backup solution intended for desktop use. It can backup any subset of files and directories. Exclusions can be defined by regular expressions. A maximum individual file size limit can be defined. Backups may be saved to any local and remote directories that are supported by gnome-vfs. There is a Gnome GUI interface for configuration and restore.

You can use apt-get install to install it and setup for you.

Thats pretty much what I intend to do anyway tredegar. I did notice a distinct lack of anything storage related in the HCL (I suspect that I'll have to email jeremy, as I don't remember there being an appropriate category for a device like this) - plus I know "just the bloke" to explain all about tar (in english rather than manpage geek) to the "enth degree".

It did occur to me, that if it does run some sort of embedded linux then it should be possible to do something with the "supported file system" - but I'll work out about making tar archives first - they can always sit in my /home until I'm "all about" with the device.

I already use static IP's for my network, though if it transpires that it only "does" DHCP, then it will stay mounted once it's up and running - that should (if I remember correctly) negate the changing of the IP address - then I can just sort it, say once a month or something (as my backups wouldn't vary that much anyway).

The FTP option was one of the things I had in mind when I decided on that particular model - if you checked the span link in my original post, you'd have seen that theres a number of possible candidates for what I'm trying to do @ about the 50 quid mark.

As for permissions, well when I tried this before, but using CDR's, when it came to restoring stuff, it also took forever to change all the permissions as "it" (SuSE 10 at the time) wanted to restore everthing for root and read only for user - a complete pain explaining how to change the permissions to my partner (she's a teacher so only really experienced with windows) - and for me to go digging through the system to find everything that needed to be changed (theres probably a way of doing that "in bulk" but I couldn't find anything at the time.

Ooo! ta very much for that suggestion Fred, I'll have a look later today. The only "bad" news being that the GUI is a gnome one - I never managed to get on with gnome - IMO KDE is far more intuitive to lazy, unimaginitive dummie like me

I will, of course, post back when the device turns up and I've got it setup.

regards

John

If you install Sbackup, it will install gnome dependencies it needs.

One of the good things about linux is mixing & matching environments.

The IP address doesn't have to change, you can configure DHCP to use fixed addresses.

USB 1.1 will be agonisingly slow, much slower than ethernet. USB1.1 has a 12Mb/s (1.5MB/s) bandwidth, but you'll be lucky to see 1MB/s in practice. 100Mb/s (12.5MB/s) Ethernet reaches about 10MB/s (my network tops out at 10.8MB/s).

But then, for backups, is speed that big a deal? If you do incremental backups overnight, then speed isn't much of an issue. It really boils down to what you can put up with.

And busybox!

Ar, well, you may very well turn out to be correct, though finding out what it's actually running is a bit over my head.

As for sorting it so that it does actually directly support a linux file system i.e. moding the firmware is about 10 miles over my head - I can manage a 6 speed splitter and range change box along with nearly 30 tonnes of bottled water (or paving slabs, as it turned out today), but thats it

I'll post back when I get the device.

regards

John

Yo can try bacula also. it is capable of taking backup over network(FASTEST ALSO).