Previously Butty wrote:
What's the general consensus on external hard drives. I am looking to set
one up as a backup device but not sure whether to go for a host powered USB
drive (in the region of 40 - 60GB) or go for a 120GB externally powered USB
drive.

Ideally I want a dive I can plug in and leave it do its incremental and full
backups without having to turn the power on and off at system start-up and
shutdown. What are the externally powered drives like for leaving powered on
all the time and is it advisable to do or not do this?

With having it on and next to the computer you eleminate some of the
benefits of regular backup:

- Fire/break-in/overtemperature/... will kill your backup as well
- Power-surges will get your backup as well.
- If you do something stupid, you may accidentally erase
your backup.
- With only one backup many people would say "one backup is
no backup". Ususally at least two (better three) independent media sets
are required for working backup. The reason is that if you discover
your master is bad while backing up to media A, the backup on A is
already destoyed. With incremental its a little different, though.

So in essence wour set-up is a little more like a RAID and less
like a backup. Besides this, it should work, depending on the
external drive enclosure. I have one (Agrosy, firewire), that does
not work with Linux when it is on befeore the computer has finished
booting.

As to host-powered vs. externally-powered, all the host powered
external HDDs have notebook HDDs in there, since USB does not provide
enough power and no 12V line. Notebook HDDs are generally slower and
less reliable. They are however more shock-resistant. I would still
go with externally-powered.

Arno
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