…you realise you have over a third of a terabyte of hard disk in your flat.
Just bought a 160 GB disk for my PC (Western Digital, £80 from Dabs). Currently transferring data from the old 40 GB disk onto it, after which that disk will be recycled as a big bucket of storage in my Linux box (which has been struggling on just 10 GB). So my web server will be going down later today.
That will leave me with…
- PC: 60 GB + 160 GB
- Mac: 80 GB
- Linux: 10 GB + 40 GB
- Total: 350 GB
Cue nostalgia about getting 100K on a Spectrum Microdrive, my 80 MB Amiga hard disk, etc…
Avaragado's blog 
Backups
So what do you do about backups? Also, you know you are a geek when one of your partitions is
/dev/hdf1. And some of us only had the 16kb Spectrum, and when typing in programs from magazines had to make the code smaller at the same time. First thing to go was the comments :-)I use almost half of the disk space for backups.
Heck, I even have tons of memory: 1GB, .5GB and 1.5GB respectively. Even my main video card has 128MB.
Re: Backups
Let me see —
I have 3x80Gb drives in one Linux server, 2x60Gb in the other, and half of that is for backups using a good old hard link + rsync approach.
Even with the 20Gb in my crappy laptop (most of which is another copy of the music on the servers) and the 80Gb in the other Windows PC (most of which is unused), I’ve only got a woeful 460Gb in total. I mean, that’s not even half a terabyte.
Interestingly, the Frys price-index suggests that the cost is definitely coming down quicker than it has for a while: 37¢/Gb at the moment..
Re: Backups
My problem with the hard drives is that they don’t make big slow ones anymore. I was lucky to get my 120GB drives as 5400rpm. They use less electricity, stay cooler, are quicker to spinup and far more reliable.
After having 5 IBM (now Hitachi) drives fail (I only bought 4, had several replaced under warranty, and several of those then failed), reliability is the number one thing I look for.
[And I don’t by drives that rhyme with “DeathStar” any more either :-]
Re: Backups
Backups? I dump stuff like photos to DVD occasionally. My SVN repositories are set up to do hot backups on each commit, so I’ve got some redundancy there (but only to the same disk – I need to fix that now I’ve got two disks in the Linux box).
Maybe I should sign up for Google mail and mail myself stuff. Instant backup, at least for up to a gig… (privacy policy notwithstanding :-)
Re: Backups
“Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
— Linus Torvalds, after his hard disk failed
Spods!
What a bunch of spods you lot are… Penile envy the bunch of you…
Re: Spods!
You, you are right. Replace GB in all my posts with inches.
640 is enough to make anyone scream :-)