A taste of Linux.

Having decided that i wanted an external hard drive for my backups i looked around at various sites and settled on a 250gb 'mistral' by CnM from SVP.co.uk. Its an ultra light drive which could fit quite happily inside a paperback novel, its that small! It came with several programs for doing various security type things on your machine, but only for MS windows. So I ordered it from SVP and paid for it online and sat back for the courier to deliver it, and it arrived two days later, just when I was beginning to give up hope of not seeing it before the weekend. Once it was unpacked and i set it all up I read the instruction manual that came with it, and none of it was relevant to linux, it was all for MS windows. But once plugged in a window popped up on my machine saying that it had detected a new device did i want to open a window for it? I clicked yes and it opened up a window, and i then set about finding out what device it was and how to get my backup program of choice [rsnapshot] working on it. But whatever option I gave it it failed at, but i eventually found out that I was missing NTFS support, so a quick yum download and installation from rpm forge and I was in business. The command "mount" showed me that it was on /dev/sda1, whilst "df -h" showed that it had 233gb available to be used. So I then configured rsnapshot to save its backups to /dev/sda1 and did a backup from the CLI, and then tweak the configuration because I hadn't got the frequency that I wanted, so I then set it as good to go by fitting it into roots crontab and then I just let it alone to see how it would go. And it works beautifully and I'm now confident that if I have something go wrong with my system I wont lose everything as I've got good backups that I know that I can restore from if necessary. -----