[sclug] My disk esplode

[David Given]

Dickon Hood wrote:
[...]
> But how inconvenient has it been?  If you've spent more than a couple of
> hours on it, you would probably have been better off buying two.

Ah, but think what I've learnt...

> I, like most people, have little interest in taking
> (managing) backups, and as such, I've had a lot of success with data
> replication.  It's not a solution to the dataloss problem, but it is far,
> far more reliable than having just the one disc.  In your case, you appear
> not to have had either.

My *real* data gets backed up with rsnapshot, a totally awesome little 
shell script that basically replicates Apple's Time Machine --- it does 
daily/weekly/monthly backups using hardlinks so that it only uses disk 
space for changed files. The backups themselves are just directory trees 
so getting individual files back is trivial. It'll even push or pull 
ssh, so it's easy to set it up to do offsite backups. Set it up once and 
never touch it again, until something goes wrong; very cool.

[...]
> There is that.  I wasn't aware that SMART didn't work over USB, but I
> suppose I should have guessed.  USB Mass Storage is little more than the
> basic SCSI command set over a USB transport, but it's missing all the nice
> bits.  SATA is a better subset of the SCSI command set over a much, much
> better transport, but still not as good.

Out of interest, is it possible to get external HDD racks? Just a box 
with cooling and power, out of which I can run a bundle of SATA cables 
to the PC. And, preferably, not industrial sized, too.

-- 
David Given
dg at cowlark.com