USB Drives — Recovery?

pipingguy writes "Now that 'thumb drives' are so inexpensive (a 1-GB SD card with USB housing/adapter costs about $25), which programs does Slashdot recommend for system recovery? What is the need-to-have software? Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy (but very useful/flexible as opposed to the old fixed-capacity NAND devices)."

Comments

Thumb Drive

[black6host]

As far as thumb drives go I'd recommend the Titanium Cruzer which comes into up to 2 gig models. I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine, and here in Florida we get a lot of rain. I've pretty much abused it much more than I expected to and it's never failed me once. I'll leave others to comment on what to put on it but if you're loadking up a pice of crap that's what your going to have just when you need it at your clients office. Quality tools pay for themselves.

Regards,
Fleet

Re:Thumb Drive

[tehcyder]

I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine

Aren't you worried about your bike being stolen if you leave the keys in it all the time?

Re:Thumb Drive

[winnabago]

Additionally, how does he use the USB drive if it is always connected to the motorcycle?!

the same ones you used before...

[skiingyac]

...when you copied to CD/DVD/FTP/SMB/whatever.

why is this on the front page?

Re:the same ones you used before...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While most of the software is the same, what this adds is the potential for software that rewrites, and in general just better potential to run things straight from the usb stick. With CDs you tend to want to just copy/install to harddrive to run, which isn't always an option.

Personally, I have my usb thumbdrive plugged in the back of my router and used for storage, and am running samba on the router to share it with the network.

I havn't actually bothered to put much on it yet, but its nice to know I have the capability if I need to. Plus with 2gb for $30, how can you go wrong? If only that sale wasn't limited to 1 per customer..

Fire wire harddisk

[Joe The Dragon]

are better when you need to restore a image to a system

Re:Bootable Flash Drive with Debian installed.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not very informative. Cannot expect mod points by throwing a very general suggestion to install something. I could say: First I would install Windows and then find tools to install on it for *whatever* question you asked.

USB2 external harddisk - or internal

[billstewart]

I guess there may be some older Macs that have USB1.x and Firewire, but most systems these days have USB2, and if you've got that, you might as well use it for external disks. For a USB flash stick, backing up to internal disk is probably fine, but for backing up the internal disks, there's a lot to be said for external drives on USB (or Firewire).

• External disks have a separate power supply, so if you lose the internal drive because of bad power, the external is usually still safe.
  
• External USB/FW drives have their own controllers, so if you lose the internal drives because your disk controller fried or your RAID controller scribbled the disks they're probably still safe, even if they're plugged in.
• External drives are often unplugged, so if you lose the internal data because some software scribbled the disk or a user did something really stupid, the data's probably still there. You might even get lucky and dodge a virus attack, though that's harder, and USB drives are more likely to get plugged into different machines at different times, making it easier to propagate viruses.