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

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.

ipod

[spooky_nerd]

Why not use an ipod? Yes, it is external, but you have a 20 or 40 GB hard drive for backing up data, and you can listen to music.

Use USB2/Firewire if at all possible

[Elektrance]

I was looking into similar products for a project at work, and we settled on CMS Backup Solutions They have both PCMCIA, Firewire and USB drives, in varying capacities. If you look at their page, you'll notice that the PCMCIA drive is 75Mbps. This is not a limitation of the drive, but of the PCMCIA standard. We were using Ghost to clone the entire drive to these devices, which can take up to 10 hours on PCMCIA, but under 2 on USB2 (480Mbps). The CMS drives come with backup software as well, however I cannot give you any details on how it works, as we had already decided to go with Norton Ghost.

As well, as others have mentioned, you can get a removable drive for the laptop itself. This is definately the fastest method (800Mbps). I have used these on compaq laptops, they hold a normal laptop HD, and you just swap it into the expansion slot when you need it.

Madness

[Monkelectric]

This is pretty close to madness. One of the first thing you learn as a consultant is to not let the CUSTOMER tell you what they need -- theyre almost always wrong (and so are you). :)

If you *have* to have a hotswappable HD ready to go. Buy him a USB or Firewire external case and put a laptop HD in it, get a copy of ghost and ghost the machine to the new HD every night. This solution *sucks*. And im not sure ghost supports USB/Firewire HDs?

If your dad is likely to come home most nights, convince him he needs to keep ALL his work files in a single directory (My Documents is ideal for this). Grab a copy of Unison and sync the data back to a home machine each night over the network. Its pretty efficent as unison will only send back files that have changed. If his HD dies at some point -- goto best buy and buy a new laptop drive which you were going to have to do ANYWAYS for your hot swap plan. This plan is great if: your dad comes home often, you have enough HD space to back up his documents (delete some porn if you dont). AND e is not constnatly creating huge files (GB size).

This is what I do to backup my laptop -- I have about 5Gb of documents, and never more then 10 megs gets changed at once. I even have a 4gb virtual machine I backup now (in addition to the 5gbs), and that takes like 10 mins.