Re: USB drives as backup medium

["dj_segfault" <user=60@nabble.blu.org>]

 jbk 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.