Picked up a WD My Book external drive.
Last Friday I found a great deal at Best Buy, they had knocked off $100 from the price of a WD 500GB external USB drive. I was looking for an external drive for backup purposes and I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time.
On Saturday I hooked it up to my Debian Sid server and it was immediately recognized. Mounted the Fat32 partition and copied off whatever software was on it in case I decide to use it on a Windows machine one day.
Then I proceeded to prepare the drive: umount the partition, fdisk to remove the existing partition and create a new one, then mkfs.ext3 to format the partition as ext3. Mounted it again and then tested copying some small and large files over to it, worked like a charm.
Now it was time to write a script to run rsync on the server and send the files to the USB drive. I decided to leave out /dev/, /proc/, /sys/ and of course /mnt/mybook/, the USB’s mount point. It took 4 1/2 hours to sync up the server’s dual 200GB SATA drives to the external USB drive.
On Sunday, I synced up the VPS and all the laptops to the server. Ran the rsync script and it took only 20 minutes to sync up this time, not bad and no more DVD shuffle.
Somewhere there must be
A great set of rules
Explaining this crazy game
To the simplest of fools