Cyberward.net

David du Chemin has a post up about the hyperdrive he bought. Sounds like something you add to your car to get you 400 miles in 4 minutes (I wish) but it is a on site backup device. I have wanted one of these, not that I would really use it that much, but they still come in handy. Would have been great on my summer vacation. Epson makes the P-5000 that will store 80 gigs for OVER $600. Yikes. I am buying a lens before that. Amazon lists the 40 gig model for $279 and the 100 gig for $319. Much more reasonable. Not as big a screen, but getting approachable in price.

I am getting tired of my linux based setup. It just doesn’t work well enough. The biggest issue I have is that everytime it gets powered down (vacation, storm, etc) and comes back up, it doesn’t quite. I always have to execute some command line magic to get everything recognised. I have tried Gentoo, Ubuntu, Mythbuntu, all with the same issue. I think it is the add in SATA card I have in there, but I don’t want to swap out more computer hardware this time.

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In my backup strategy, I mentioned, like Scott, I had a small 2.5 inch drive that I could use to keep a backup of my data when on the road. I don’t use it much. I don’t travel often, and I am not allowed to use it at work.

So, with a trip coming up in July, I thought I would test it out. From a short trip to Rochester MN last weekend, I had some images on my laptop. (I hadn’t deleted the cards before getting the images to the main computer though) I copied the masters to the portable, then imported them into Aperture from the external drive. Oops. Several garbled images. Reformated the drive and I tried again. Same thing, different images. Dead drive, or housing. Guess I am going shopping.

So after I talked about my backup strategy, I went and started my command to sync my pictures. I went to checkup on it, and it was stuck. I checked, and I was out of space. Oh oh. I stopped the sync. Now what? Well, the drives are sporting LVM2, and I had extra space available, so I just added some.

First add some more space to the volume:
# lvextend -L +1G /dev/vgnas/pictures

Then tell ext3 about the extra space.
# resize2fs /dev/vgnas/pictures

Thats it. I did it live, without unmounting. I then went back to my rsync command, and it continued right where it left off. Sometimes I really like linux.

Scott Kelby just posted his backup strategy, and I thought I would follow up with mine.

The thing that is really interresting about Scott and my solutions, is that there are a lot of similarities. But mine cost a lot less.

His first step is to save on location to an Epson P-500 (link). That would be cool. I have looked at those wistfully before. I don’t have anything comparable. I don’t travel as much as he does, so I just have to put in my empty card and go from there.
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