Chris Jones wrote: > > Raises a few other issues. > > 1. How do I determine if a modern USB drive will work with USB 1.1?
Unless I am totally mistaken, USB is backward compatible. > 2. What brand, model, size do you recommend? Brand and model is, I think, a personal choice depending on quality. Most important of these is the size and a reliable brand. For example, I have a little portable hard disk here (320GB I think) which I can connect to a laptop. It draws its power from the USB port and is a 3.2" disk (the ones that go in the laptops). I have another USB disk, which is actually a normal hard disk in an enclosure. Basically, one can also buy a hard disk enclosure and a hard disk separately. Depending the port (USB or eSATA), one would want an appropriate enclosure and also an appropriate hard disk (IDE compared to the newer ones which are SATA). But my knowledge about all this is limited. I hope I have given some starting points and other may correct me if I am wrong. > 3. With only one USB port .. I'll need a hub.. will that work? Do you have another USB device that you are using? If yes, hub will do perfectly. > 4. Will the old laptop provide enough power .. er, to drive the drive? If you get the smaller drive (2.5" IIRC, the ones that in laptops), they usually work from the USB port for power. > 5. .. > > I'm currently writing my backups to an 8GB flash drive.. and manually copy BTW, I am sure somebody would have mentioned it by now, rsync is the way to go for regular backups or to even save snapshots going back weeks, even months and years with no unnecessary disk usage. > them over to a DVD+RW .. once in a while .. So I have everything immediately > available if I need to restore a couple of files .. and of course, I'd have > something to recover from .. should a power surge toast the laptop & anything > connected to it, for instance. > > In essence, I'm pretty much using the solution you recommend .. with the > difference that flash drives are easier to carry around but considerably more > expensive than external HD's. If flash drives work for you, it should be okay. But from this thread you at least know about other options now. Good luck. PS: Sorry if my comments are kind of not meshing in smoothly with the thread, I jumped into this thread quite suddenly. -- Please reply to this list only. I read this list on its corresponding newsgroup on gmane.org. Replies sent to my email address are just filtered to a folder in my mailbox and get periodically deleted without ever having been read. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org