This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
5 Aug 2004
I just picked up an external Seagate 160GB hard drive with the intention of using it as a primary backup device for my home office. I can easily plug it into any machine via USB or Firewire and back the computer up.
While I was setting up the backup scheduling for my laptop, however, I realized that I can’t really create a schedule. My laptop is very mobile—it moves from room to room and place to place with me. I can’t expect to have the drive’s USB connection plugged into my laptop at any given time. If I schedule the backup to run at 1am, I would need to make sure I have the laptop on my desk and connected in order for the backup to succeed.
What would be great is a small IP addressable gadget that I could plug this drive into so that it could become a simple Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. That way my laptop could be backed up over my wireless net from anywhere in the house.
Something like this might exist already but I didn’t turn anything up in a few moments of research.
I would recommend plugging your new drive into a Linux machine running BackupPC:
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net
I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it just works great. It does full and incremental backups of all my desktops and laptops. The backup scheduling is very flexible, and works with Mac, Windows, and Linux machines.
Anyway, it works for me, so I thought I’d suggest it.
Does anybody know of a NAS device that will accept firewire peripherals? I already have 2 external firewire drives, and do not wish to abandon the technology.
With regard to the comments about the Linksys NSLU2’s file format. As I understand it, Linksys anticipates you’ll put a USB drive on it, and it will then format the drive to ext3. I believe they anticipate that your drive will remain there on the linksys network storage link. Once on the network, windows accesses the files from the link using standard file sharing (smb). Since there are standard smb clients for Linux and Macs, all machines on the network can access and write files on the USB drives via the NSLU2. The only reason you’d need the ext3 drivers is if you decided to pull a drive off the linksys NSLu2, and try to read directly off it. And since the NSLU2 allows you to set up security, I’m not certain whether you’d be able to acces the files directly anyway, without changing the ownership, since the file permissions may have been set up by the embedded linux system on the device, and that would then eliminate the ability to connect it back to the link. That’s my hunch anyway.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned these devices
I’ve got a couple of these little gems on my Mac only network at the office. I’m pushing backups to them daily, and they quietly just do their thing. Their not expensive, their small, silent. My only gripe about them is the Mac software/drivers are a little less robust than their Windows counterparts, you Windows folks should just love these things. They’ve got great tech support, too. Plus, if you’ve got a hack.mentality, I’m sure it wouldn’t be to hard to put a fatter drive into them.
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Adam Kalsey
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August 6, 2004 6:46 PM
For now I’m trying a my old laptop with Windows 2000 and automated backups courtesy of Retrospect. I’ve managed to quiet the drive by simply setting the power management software to turn the drive off after a few minutes of inactivity. Since the machine is only active in the middle of the night, I don’t care about the noise.