Just getting started on this. I'm going to slowly update this page
as I have consistent success with my configuration.
-
The ADS USB2.0/1394 case does work. I had another cheaper unit that
was nothing but trouble. A friend brought his WinNT drive in a different
enclosure over today
and plugged it into the same Linux system and we had nothing but trouble
with it, constant stream of I/O errors.
This is the one I bought:
http://store.yahoo.com/pcsound/840971.html
The StorTecc PM-350U2-LCS also works and is more compact, but will only
hold a regular sized 3.5" hard drive.
This is the one I bought:
http://www.dealsonic.com/stalidetousb.html
- Choose a good USB 2.0 card. I picked up a StarTech USB 2.0 from
the local MicroCenter. I figured if it doesn't work I could just take
it back and try another one. I've been told many times to be sure
to stay away from VIA chipsets.
This is how this card comes up in lspci:
00:0c.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.1 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.2 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:0c.3 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 2.0 Controller (rev 01)
Strangely I had another USB2.0/1394 card from OrangeMicro (also recommended
by other Linux users) that I had a lot trouble with.
- Use Fedora or anything with at least a 2.4.22 kernel. The system is
FAR more stable with 2.4.22 than it ever was with RH9's 2.4.20 kernel.
With USB 2.0 it would occasionally lock the machine hard when backing up
a fast machine over the network. For a while I went back to the motherboard's
USB 1.1 ports to slow down the backup. That at least kept it from
crashing but the load average would get very high. I'm using USB 2.0
reliably now with hardly any noticeable load on the backup machine.
- I'm using this all currently with a 250G drive. I have several
large drives (160G, 200G and now 250G) that are in easy swap carriers
that go into the ADS case.
- Turn on the enclosure and plug it into your system. Something
resembling the following should appear in your
/var/log/messages :
... kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:0c.3-3, assigned address 2
... kernel: scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
... kernel: Vendor: WDC WD25 Model: 00JB-32FUA0 Rev: 0 0
... kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
... kernel: Attached scsi disk sdd at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
... kernel: SCSI device sdd: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
... kernel: sdd: sdd2
In this example you can see the hard drive is already formatted because
it shows my existing partition sdd2 .
If your drive isn't partitioned use
fdisk /dev/sdX to partition the drive
in whatever way makes sense to you.
- In my case these drives are being used for backups where there will
only be multi-gigabyte files on the drive so I created the ext3 file system
with the the command line:
mkfs.ext3 -j -m 0 -T largefile4 /dev/sdd2
The meaning of all the options are:
| -j | - Create the filesystem with the ext3 journal |
| -m 0 | - Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user. I set this to 0 because only root will write to this filesystem. |
| -T largefile4 | - Use one inode per 4 megabytes, more efficient for very large files. |
Please note: There is a bug in the Fedora Core 1 version of
mkfs.ext3 which causes it to core dump
with the -T largefile4 option. There
is a fixed e2fsprogs RPM at
http://people.redhat.com/laroche/.
which fixes the problem. More info about this bug is in
Bugzilla Bug# 113150.
- One thing to remember when hot swapping drives is that there is a problem
with the Mass Storage driver not clearing out partitioning information
from within the kernel when swapping different geometry drives. This doesn't
always make itself evident right away but will result in flaky operation
or what look like drive errors. The solution to the problem is after removing
one drive be sure to tell the kernel to eject the drive before installing a different drive. This also applies to Compact
Flash memory devices. For example, if your device comes up on
/dev/sdd do this:
# umount /dev/sdd1
# eject /dev/sdd
# mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/XXXXX
Comments From People Like You!
Network Backup Using Large Hard Drive in External Enclosure |  add a comment |
Shawn
07-Dec-2005 03:14 |
Good Day
I have a very wierd scenaria in that I have a 300GB external USB drive for backups. When I plug in the USB Drive the External drive Icon appears on the KDE desktop and when i click on it I can access it.
Now when I run my backup script to the /media/usbdisk4 directory it writes these files to the /media/usbdisk4 directory and not to the USB drive,even though this is where the USB drive is "mounted",therefore the main HDD is filling up.I am really stuck here as I thought the USB drive automatically mounted to the /media/usbdisk4 (as can be seen on the desktop??)
Thanks
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Watch out for vfat!!
24-Sep-2004 16:48 |
So I decided to not "completely" follow the "manual" on this page and backup to vfat (fat32). I thought this might be useful if I needed to get my files restored if I ever went back to Windows.
I tried a couple of tests and each one created a tar file that appears to be corrupt. I was unable to restore from it.
But luckily I am aware of the first rule of disaster recovery. Make sure you test your scenario.
I converted the drive to ext3 and it seems to be working fine now. I don't plan to go back to Windows at home now so I'm sure to be Ok. I can always boot off my System Rescue CD to copy over files when Microsoft releases their product as Open Source. Although I'm not sure I want to use an Open Source MS Product.
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Gordon McCague
19-Sep-2004 09:29 |
I have an external 80GB drive that I can attach to my system via USB2 or FireWire. I really appreciate the shell script providing the commands to backup my data. Especially since it covers a few items I would not have thought of.
Do you have a recommended command for backing up a postgresql database? I can extrapolate from the command provided for mysql but want to make sure I have what I need. I will check out the postgresql documentation for recommendations but it looks like you have given backup some thought and might be able to help me avoid rookie issues.
Not that I'm a backup rookie. I just finally (and completely) switched to Fedora 2 on my workstation at home but still suffer from WinDoze.
Thank you!
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Andy Stewart
02-Mar-2004 15:39 |
Nice article, and very useful - especially highlighting the mkfs bug in fedora, I have been banging my head against a brickwall with that one for a while. I have also used Troy's excellent tip and as he suggests this does make swapping usb drives somewhat easier.
As an input to his article, I am now using a Maxtor 120Gb USB drive to backup my Fedora Core 1 system, and thought I would share my script for doing that. I wanted the drive to hold as much data as possible and also handle the cycling of versions to maximise the disk space. I do a full backup each day, cos I can,and only delete a previous backup if the space is needed;
Works very well, I have /dev/maxtor_usb_120 mounting to /mnt/backup, and holds currently 8 x 18Gb .tar.gz files which it rotates very well. Hope this may help someone;
#!/bin/bash
#
#script to backup my data folder, web folder, mysql databases,
#and important configuration files.
#
#last modified : 19.February.2004
#author : Andy Stewart
#
DATA="/home /root /data /opt"
CONFIG="/etc /var/named /var/lib /maintenance /usr/local/apache"
LOGDIR="/maintenance/logs"
BACKUPDIR="/mnt/backup"
MYDATE=`date +%F`
LASTFILESIZE=0
LASTFILENAME=""
echo "backup started : `date`" > $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
echo "----------------------------------------------------" >> $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
mount $BACKUPDIR
#find the last file in the backup folder
#and store information about it.
for FILE in $BACKUPDIR/*; do
if [ -f $FILE ]; then
FILEINFO=(`ls -lk $FILE`)
LASTFILENAME=${FILEINFO[8]}
LASTFILESIZE=${FILEINFO[4]}
fi
done
#delete files until there is enough space to hold a file
#the same size as the last backup.
for FILE in $BACKUPDIR/*; do
DISKINFO=(`df -k | grep $BACKUPDIR`)
DISKFREE=${DISKINFO[3]}
if [ -f $FILE ]; then
if [[ "$LASTFILESIZE" -gt "$DISKFREE" ]]; then
rm -vf $FILE >> $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
fi
fi
done
mysqldump -umysql_user -pmysql_pwd --quote-names --opt --all-databases > /data/backup/mysql_$MYDATE.sql
tar -cvvzf $BACKUPDIR/backup_$MYDATE.tar.gz $DATA $CONFIG >> $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
umount $BACKUPDIR
echo "-----------------------------------------------------" >> $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
echo "backup finished `date`" >> $LOGDIR/backup_$MYDATE.log
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Troy
18-Dec-2003 23:58 |
OK, here is a cool thing that isn't too well known, but has been around since Redhat 9: Devlabel. In a nutshell, devlabel consistently associates storage devices with device nodes. What does that mean? Well, consider the situation where you plug two digital memory reader into two USB ports. The first (reader A) shows up as /dev/sda1 and the second (reader B) as /dev/sda2. However, if you plug them in in reverse order next time, reader A will show up as /dev/sda2 and reader B is now /dev/sda1. This is annoying if you have put entries in /etc/fstab to allow you to easily mount USB storage devices.
Devlabel to the rescue.
Sorry I don't have time to explain this fully, but here is an example of the process I go through to use devlabel with removable storage devices:
make a devlabel for Belkin USB 2.0 external drive enclosure
(enclosing Seagate 80GB drive):
plug in to USB 2.0 port; power-up
locate drive (examine dmesg output)
(likely /dev/sda for first attached removable device)
identify desired device for mounting:
fdisk -l /dev/sda
identify drive UUID (informative, not required):
devlabel printid -d /dev/sda1
create devlabel:
devlabel add -d /dev/sda1 -s /dev/external_drive --automount
devlabel status
(informative, not required)
create mount point:
mkdir /mnt/external_drive
update /etc/fstab:
/dev/external_drive /mnt/external_drive auto defaults 0 0
[sorry, my clever formatting is lost when this stuff is posted]
Now, no matter when I plug in my external drive, it will always get associated with /dev/external_drive. Better yet, as soon as I plug the drive in, the system will automatically mount it at /mnt/externa_drive.
Right now, you are either reading this and thinking "huh?" or else you are thinking "this may be the coolest thing I have ever heard of." Those of you thinking the latter are probably like me and have about 18 USB devices, and have just about pulled your hair out trying to get things to work easily and reliably in linux.
Now, someone make my day: How can you get an icon to appear automatically after you plug in a devlabel device? I am using Gnome, and I want to plug in my drive and have a drive icon automatically appear on my desktop. Can someone get this to work and tell me how they did it?
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