[xubuntu-users] Hard drives and backup - Was: Am I the only one who still uses floppies?

[Petter Adsen]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:25:05 +0200
Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 21:42:46 -0400, JMZ wrote:
> >After a week or two I make ongoing archive tarball CD backups.
> 
> Hi Jordan,
> 
> I would like to use floppies too, but all the drives I used failed after
> a short while, so I have given up mounting a floppy drive to the PC
> perhaps 10 or more years ago. However, floppies aren't that unsafe
> media as CDs are. Most likely even 20 years and older HD floppies were
> the data was written with a DD (not HD) drive are still ok, while CDs
> could fail after 20 days or perhaps 20 hours. The best available backup
> media for home usage are hard disk drives and CDROM. It's nearly
> impossible to get CDROM good/fast working, so I backup to an external
> hard disk drive. JFTR regarding an EU Regulation external drives must
> be green drives, but crappy software such as GVFS make them spin down
> and up again and again. Most developers writing such buggy software
> aren't interested to fix this bug, so you need to remove crap, such as
> GVFS if you won't damage those drives.

Is it the actual software that makes the drive spin down, or do the
drives do it themselves? If the former, the software should be
configurable with regard to timeouts etc, and if the latter, can't this
be controlled with hdparm and/or smartctl or similar?

I'm curious, as I have an external USB hard drive that I'm considering
actually using for something.

A quick read of smartctl(8) leads me to this:

petter at odin:~$ sudo smartctl -g apm /dev/sda
smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [x86_64-linux-3.19.0-23-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

APM level is:     254 (maximum performance)

The man page further says that the value can be set, with values above
128 not allowing the drive to spin down. It also says "the actual
behavior defined is also vendor-specific" - does this mean that this approach often/sometimes will not work? I have to admit I do not really know how this works, hence the questions.

> However, at lest one developer cared about this bug and fixed it [1] :).
> 
> To cut a long story, for backups don't rely on CDs. FWIW the
> biggest pain I experienced is caused by DDS/DAT drives, not the tapes
> cause issues, the drives are a PITA.

*shudder*

Yes, I remember those with very little fondness.

> IMO for home usage external HDDs are the best solution for backups,
> even if you insist in using GVFS and similar, since a backup drive
> anyway should be disconnected from the computer, when not in use.

Agree. The only problem I have with that is that I have found USB hard
drives to sometimes be somewhat unreliable, at least the ones I have
owned. It might have been due to bad/cheap electronics in the
enclosures, as the drives themselves seemed fine when connected directly
to a SATA port. OTOH, I've had very few problems with CD/DVD/BD, but I
never rely on a backup of anything important to a single medium.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
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