Firewire on STABLE: Sane for drive-based backups?

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Sunday 12 October 2003 10:41, Jason Fesler wrote:
> I did not have much luck on digging through the archives. Does anyone have
> any sucess stories on using external firewire drives on the stable branch
> of freebsd?  Does hot swap work?  Can I mount, dd or ufsdump or
> newfs/rsync, then umount and unplug it cleanly?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

> I'm considering my options for doing once-a-month backups, and tape just
> totally blows the budget.  I'm currently using a second drive to produce
> snapshots, but that doens't leave me with any off-site backups without
> taking the system down to swap drives.

Firewire enclosures + hard disks are quite cost effective in my experience.

I have used a Maxtor "external hard disk" and a "Mapower" one -  
http://www.mapower.com.tw/ - (both have the same chip in them), if I was 
going to swap harddisks over a lot I would probably stump up for a "Drive 
dock" though -> http://www.wiebetech.com/products/firewiredrivedock.html

They end up looking like SCSI disks, they perform very well (eg 20-30Mb/sec at 
fairly low CPU usage).

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
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