Re: USB drives as backup medium

["Fred @ Planetary Server" <user=1474@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:42:36 -0500, jbk <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> As posted in the past I am using a consumer level travan based tape   
> backup system. It is getting old has an eight gig capacity which forces   
> me to be selective in what I backup. The largest travan capacity with a   
> new drive is 20/40 gig. So, looking at the price of the new 20/40 drive   
> at close to $300 new and three additional tapes at $50 each for a total   
> investment of $450 I could by five 80G USB drives maybe even six. My   
> total disc storage across three household computers is in the   
> neighborhood of 80gig, but this includes distro downloads and kernel   
> source code that I wouldn't backup. So my current backup script uses tar   
> and dd to write to a device a hash table of known directories that I can   
> edit to include or exclude. So what is my question? Well typically I   
> cycle the same 4 tapes each month with a full backup Monday and Inc on   
> Friday. So when I am ready to overwrite the tape I just erase and it is   
> ready. With a tape you append to the end of the data. How would I   
> achieve the same with a disk? I'm sure the answer is in front of me but   
> I am not seeing it. 
> Jim KR