It is time. Time for me to go ahead and back up my digital music. It’s something I’ve always intended to do but didn’t want to spend the money.
Last weekend, I found a 500GB hard drive at Newegg for $139.99. That and a Thermaltake USB2.0/ESATA case stayed under $200.00 including tax. Compare this with $290 for the 400GB ATA internal drive I bought when I started my Kuro Box and it’s a good deal.
I got the drive and formatted it NTFS figuring I could plug it in to my laptop as well and have some flexibility. It worked on the Kuro just fine but I couldn’t write because the NTFS kernel driver doesn’t support that. So I found the ntfs-3g driver, compiled and installed that, which worked great, but it was sloooow. User-mode filesystem driver and all that.
So I blew away the NTFS partition and reformatted with ext3. Copies are quite a bit faster now. Not blindingly fast–it’s taking a few seconds to copy each song, so it will take many hours to do the first pass. I started it with “rsync” but realized cp would be quicker and it didn’t matter if the destination is empty. Once I do the first pass I’ll use rsync to keep them in sync.
I also plan on using backupPC to keep my laptops backed up to the rest of the space I have on the drive.