On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 10:12:49AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For the next backup server I'll have to implement, I was asked to see
> the feasability of using USB disks instead of tapes.
> 
> I know there are virtual tapes, but do they work on removable disks?

That is what I'm using right now, a pair of 300GB USB.
The large amount of holding disk I have on this system
is not needed, but it helps more when I do archive dumps
to tape.

  Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/hda2     ext3     19G   12G  6.9G  62% /
  ...
  /dev/sda1     ext2    280G  223G   58G  80% /vt/1
  /dev/sdb1     ext2    280G  206G   75G  74% /vt/2
  /dev/hda6     ext3    114G  6.8G  102G   7% /hold/disk1
  /dev/hdb6     ext3     74G  181M   70G   1% /hold/disk2


You could leave the prepared FAT filesystem on the disks.
I chose to reformat and put a regular linux filesystem on them.
Realizing that there would be very few files on those disks,
compared to the number or inodes created by default when running
mke2fs, I used options to specify a more reasonable number and
gaining an extra few percent capacity for data.

BTW make sure you have usb 2.0, not 1.1 interfaces in your
computer.  I had to get an extra card to update my old box.
Before getting the card I did try an create the filesystem.
Took 13 hours to run mke2fs :)

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)