High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup?

jspivack asks: "My dad is looking for a very portable backup system for his laptop. He's tired of going without his apps and data for days on end when it goes down - and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair. I figured this would be the perfect use for a high-capacity PCMCIA hard drive: he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD. No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine. The problem is, I've googled around and it would seem that Toshiba only makes PCMCIA drives in a 5GB flavor, despite the fact that they have 1.8" drives going to 60GB. Have I missed some other high-capacity (>=20Gb) -internal- PCMCIA drives (Google's not perfect, and neither am I)? Does anyone know if I could buy a 5GB PCMCIA drive and a larger 'embedded' drive and just swap the larger drive itself into the PCMCIA interface portion of the smaller drive? I know it would be taller, but both of his slots are open. Does anyone know if there are technological barriers to this hack?"

Comments

Use an external drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise, when they steal his laptop, they get 2 copies of the data and he'll have 0

Hmm

[NanoGator]

Well, an alternative would be to choose a laptop brand that supports swapping of drives. My ex-boss has an IBM laptop with a removable tray that a laptop HD can be plopped into. That was one of the reasons she went with IBM: That particular external drive bay worked on most IBM brand laptops. I can also personally recommend Dell. I have an Inspiron 8200 and I have an external HD bay for it. In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too. (Note: I cannot verify this, I could easily be wrong.) However, I'd just make sure my next laptop supports 2 drives. Fixed with a little screwdriver work.

I'll be honest, though, I'm not sure you're approaching this the right way. Though that's not for me to decide (my apologies if I sound condescending) but I'd recommend using either firewire or network backup. It may not be as convenient in some ways, but there are some benefits:

1.) A network (even wireless) backup could happen automatically and sent to a machine with ridiculous amounts of storage.

2.) If you go with the PCMCIA solution, you risk losing the backup if you lose the machine. (i.e. stolen or dropped in water or something.) Basically, it'd be resilient against broader circumstances.

3.) You'd be able to approach this with already available technology, and you probably wouldn't need to buy anything extra.

Good luck. :)

Dunno Bout Implementation of this ...

[DA-MAN]

he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD

Unless the machine was identical, putting this carbon copy onto another machine will be painful. The 2k/XP HAL make it hard since it zeros in on all hardware and doesn't recover from major changes very well. Not a problem to restore once you get the machine back, but if the problem was software you are back to square one.

No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine.

Not true for anything but plain old documents. Any software installed (I'm assuming this is Windows) will probably not run off of an external drive without reinstallation due to DLL installations and registry changes that happen during the install. If you Ghost the machine off of the external HD then you are screwed unless the loaner is identical. Even then, the owner might object to this.

In addition, as you've described, finding a capacity drive bigger than 5g is damn near impossible. Your best bet is to just use an external solution. An external laptop hd via usb would do just fine.

Network backup?

[nekoniku]

If your dad has network access from the laptop -- and even better, wireless access that's available all the time -- you could hang one of these network storage puppies off the local network and use it to do one master backup and then deltas periodically. The Linksys unit comes with backup software that supposedly will do this very thing.

Re:Not only that, you can back up a meaningful amo

[John_Booty]

"Of course, running his lappie on Linux would both stop the apparently regular self-immolation"

If you read the original post, you'd see the problems with this laptop were hardware-related, not OS-related: "and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair."

Linux is a great OS, but would you care to tell us how it's going to keep his trackpad and USB ports from failing? You must be using that experimental 2.9 kernel with self-healing hardware features - the year 2020 sounds great, but remember some of us are living in 2005.