External Hard Drive
If you are like me, you probably have a few gigabytes of pictures and a some important documents lying around on your computer. And you probably have a whole bunch of stuff that you know you will never use again, but you just can’t get rid of them.
Back in the day, I used to backup my stuff on a CD-R. But like everyone else, I didn’t do it really often. Then as my data grew larger and larger, I changed the media for a DVD. But now with multi megapixel cameras, it’s not unsual to shoot a gigabyte of photos in a few days.
So today I bought myself an external hard drive enclosure. Since I have a few hard disks laying around, I simply needed the enclosure and not the drive itself. They are really cheap now — I paid mine $21. I plugged a 80GB drive in and it worked right out of the box as expected. The drive is formatted in EXT3, so I guess sometime I’ll have to reformat it in FAT32 if I want to use it on a Windows machine.
The reason why I never did frequent backups was because it was too much trouble to find out which files were updated, so I always ended up backing up everything from scratch. It would just require too much time to do it all over each time. So I wrote a simple rsync script so now I only have to plug the drive in, double-click on my script file, and everything is going to be synchronised with the hard drive. Easy as 1-2-3, quick and I don’t have to do anything!
At the price they sell these drives now, I think it’s worth getting one. I know my photos are worth more than $21!