[K12OSN] offsite backup?

[ssanders at coin.org]

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 15:41 -0500, Paul Lemke wrote:
> That's a good idea. I'll just get 2 and rotate them every other week or
> something. 
> 
> Does fc5 have any issues reading USB hard drives? 

Both FC4 and FC5 read USB hard drives fine. They will usually show up
as /dev/sdx and automatically make a mountpoint, though I usually
manually create them.

I am assembling a low-latency system for multitrack audio, According to
the gurus there, an external firewire disk is usually much faster than a
USB drive. Even though the advertised speeds are USB 2.0/480 and
Firewire/400, these guys say that for sustained throughput, the drivers
in Linux are better for Firewire. This may just be pertinent to the type
of transfers that multitrack audio does. 

I am (just this week) experimenting with FC5 and Firewire. Hotplugged,
it shows up in dmesg, but I have to manually create a mountpoint for it.
As soon as I mount it, it shows up in /media.

The actual throughput depends on the speed of the drive itself of
course, but they are pretty firm on Firewire outperforming USB.
USB/firewire cases are about USD $10 on Ebay, make sure to get one with
screws that hold the drive down. Some cheapies just have the drive
rattling around inside loose. The ones with optional fans may be good as
well, but mine are just solid aluminum.