On Monday 25 December 2006 12:30, Carlos E. R. wrote: > The Monday 2006-12-25 at 15:08 -0500, John E. Perry wrote: > > > Incidentally, you may want to invest in an external USB hard > > > drive. They're cheap these days and can hold a lot of data. I've > > > got one here that's 160 GB. It currently contains a couple of > > > generations of backup from two computers. > > > > Hmm. I blew off the tiny, hyperexpensive usb drives a couple of > > years ago, but haven't looked at them recently. That could work > > well. I had been reading up on nfs, thinking about connecting it > > to my laptop and using it to back up my data. I also made a quick > > try to get ftp working, but didn't succeed immediately, and never > > got back to it. > > You need another computer to use ftp or nfs. An usb disk is just > another "internal" disk on the system, but physically external. It is > transparent and slower, and very handy.
There are also now storage appliances that implement NFS and / or SMB/CIFS (accessed via Samba from Unix / Linux systems or via the built-in file sharing from Windows systems). These are basically stand-alone boxes with disks (often RAID arrays), a simple server computer and an Ethernet connection. They're becoming pretty affordable on a per-gigabyte basis. They're really only an advantage when you've got multiple computers that need to access a single storage repository for some reason (shared publication or media libraries, e.g., or backups). To my knowledge, no other form of connectivity (FireWire, USB, eSATA, or SCSI) works to share a device among multiple computers, so you need the network and server component if you have multiple computers accessing the storage (and don't want to recable frequently). I will be moving to a new home soon, and when I do, I think I'm going to add one of these to my setup, since I now have four separate computers all in active use whose backups I'd like to unify. Plus, I'd like to consolidate what is at the moment a very fragmented on-line library of technical papers, podcasts, ripped CDs, software downloads and other miscellany. > -- > Cheers, > Carlos E. R. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
