I bought a 200Gb hard drive ($141 with a $40 mail in rebate) and a USB external enclosure ($15). The idea was that I would have a hard drive that I could use as a backup for the 80Gb drive on the server, and also have some semi-portable storage so I could give Kodak back the 200Gb firewire drive I sort-of appropriated from them.
I hooked it up and partitioned it with 80Gb as ext2 for backing up, and the rest as VFAT so that I could use it in Linux, Mac OS X, and even (if necessary) on Windows. Then I started copying my MP3 collection to the second partition.
First sign of trouble – as it was copying, I kept getting errors from my UPS – the program that monitors the UPS was evidently having communications problems. Evidently the hard drive was doing bad things to the USB ports. I had to shut down the UPS monitor so the beeping wouldn’t drive me NUTs. (That’s a joke, son, the program that monitors the UPS is called “NUT” – Networked UPS Tool.)
But after a while, though, things went from bad to worse. The copying onto the drive seemed to be hung, and doing anything to the drive (ls, df, umount) hung so badly it couldn’t be killed. I couldn’t even do a clean shutdown on the computer. So I had to turn it off. I hate doing that, especially to a busy server – my apologies to the person who was in the middle of downloading a 200Mb mailing list archive.
Fortunately, I had the incredible foresight to order a USB 2.0 card when I ordered the drive enclosure (since it supports USB 2.0). I didn’t install the card first, because first I wanted to see if the drive was working. Well, now it appears I had to.
I bunged the card in the server and rebooted. Linux recognized it and configured it, and soon I had the ext2 partition mounted and I was happily rsyncing my primary hard drive to it. But when I tried copying stuff to the VFAT partition, I started getting all sorts of disk errors. I guess something got screwed up when the bus was getting errors. I redid the “mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb2”, and then I could copy to it. Woopee! Everything works.
Well, almost everything. My tape drive seems to be stuck – I can’t take the tape out, and “mt status” thinks that the tape drive is powered off. I’m not sure how I can run both backup methods in parallel for a while if the darn tape drive isn’t working. I’m not sure what happened, but I suspect some problem because the new USB 2.0 card went in the slot right next to the SCSI card that the tape drive operates off of. So tomorrow’s tasks will be to automate the rsync backup process that I just did manually today, and to figure out why the tape drive isn’t working and get it working again.