Linux Question

[billbenson]

I have a Passport external HD for backup. It connects through a USB port. It's really designed for Windows. It's intermittent, but usually my computers don't recognize it. I'm using Suse but have a new laptop that has Ubuntu installed. I want to switch over to the laptop as my main computer but can't because my external HD doesn't work. To be clear, I have 3 computers in total; main desktop, backup desktop, and Gaming Ubuntu laptop. My backup desktop is a dual boot Suse and Win 7.

Both of my desktops have different issues. I want to rebuild them from scratch. Maybe switch to Ubuntu as it is more popular and there is more info online regarding it.

The immediate problem is I can't do a backup from my main PC to the external HD. Without that I can't move data to my new laptop.

Also I can't get permissions on the external HD to work between computers (when it was working). I 777 the whole drive but it gave a different computer read only access. I'd like to be able to move the external HD from computer to computer including windows.


What do you recommend for an external HD? I have close to a TB of data.

[krymson]

The first thing I would look at is to see what format the hard drive is in. Journaled, Fat32, etc... That's going to be able to tell what the drive can and cant work on ( FAT32 can only transfer max of 4GB at a time.) If you have not reformatted the external drive it should be in default FAT32.

What I would do, Is i would dump everything on to the windows partitioned computer, reformat the drive to be compatible with linux (I believe linux reads non-journaled but don't quote me on that, double check before doing anything.). When that is all done, you should be able to transfer everything back on the drive, and it should work across all of the platforms without any issues.

I've had to do this with mac, and mac is unix based, which is linux's 3rd cousin twice removed from the family because of the ubuntu divorce, it should work but i wont make any promises as my experience with linux is a few months on Open Suse.

[Freelancier]

For an external drive in a mixed environment, consider a drive that's networked instead of based on USB, so that the format of the drive and drivers isn't the big deal that it will be if you're taking a drive and moving it from machine to machine while expecting all of them to recognize it. And then all three systems can share it at the same time.

[krymson]

For an external drive in a mixed environment, consider a drive that's networked instead of based on USB, so that the format of the drive and drivers isn't the big deal that it will be if you're taking a drive and moving it from machine to machine while expecting all of them to recognize it. And then all three systems can share it at the same time.

That's another way of doing it... more effective that way too.

[billbenson]

For an external drive in a mixed environment, consider a drive that's networked instead of based on USB, so that the format of the drive and drivers isn't the big deal that it will be if you're taking a drive and moving it from machine to machine while expecting all of them to recognize it. And then all three systems can share it at the same time.

Thanks guys. Freelancier, that makes a lot of sense but how do I go about finding a drive like that?

[Freelancier]

This is as good a starting point as any: The 10 Best NAS (Network-Attached Storage) Devices | PCMag.com (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp)

[billbenson]

Thanks Freelancer.