Backups

[Derek Broughton]

Nigel Ridley wrote:

> Greg Booth wrote:
>> On 8/8/07, Nigel Ridley <nigel at rmk.co.il> wrote:
>>> Derek Broughton wrote:
>>>> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Neil Winchurst wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, I thought about that, but I was told by the guys in my local
>>>>>> computer shop (they made up my computer for me) that flash drives are
>>>>>> not meant to be used for back-ups. Personally I don't see why not.
>>>>> Depending on how often you backup, because flash drives have a limited
>>>>> number of write cycles.
>>>> Yeah, but isn't that usually figured in terms of thousands (or tens of
>>>> thousands)?  Which makes it considerably more reusable than a CD-RW!
>>>>
>>>> I'd think that a flash drive would tend to make an excellent backup
>>>> medium, since backup is - with best practice - a low frequency task.
>>> You would have to think about the whole permissions thing. If you want
>>> to restore files - especially dot files then permissions are very
>>> important. A flash drive is vfat (fat32) and doesn't understand
>>> permissions. Of course you could format the flash drive to ext2 (not
>>> ext3 - you don't need a journaling file system on a flash drive).
>> 
>> Or you could tar and zip the files before copying them to the usb stick.

> 
> But that makes it difficult to restore just the files that you
> want........

Wow: sounds like another use for KDar!
-- 
derek