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High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup?

Posted by Cliff on from the will-technology-catch-up-with-our-data-needs dept.

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?"

3 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Use an external drive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful


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

  2. Network backup? by nekoniku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
  3. Use USB2/Firewire if at all possible by Elektrance · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.