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Using "My Passport" USB Storage on Ubuntu
You need to back up your data, and a USB hard drive is probably the easiest way to do it, especially if you have a laptop as opposed to a desktop. If you are on Ubuntu and planning to use the widely available My Passport series of USB drives, here's what you need to do before you start backing up. First some background. A USB hard drive works like the hard drive inside your computer, but is mounted via USB. Utility-wise, you can think of it as a bigger version of a thumb drive. You plug it in, copy your data over, and unplug it. I recently got a 250GB model, branded "My Passport™" and made by a company called WD (aka Western Digital), for about 5,000 pesos or US$120. (You can probably get it for less, but I didn't have time to shop around.) The My Passport is a series of external USB drives which are relatively small, thin, and light. I chose this drive over the other brand available at the store because the My Passport works with just a single USB cable. It does not require a second USB or an adapter for power. (This is crucial for me because I only have 3 USB ports, two of which are taken up by mouse and keyboard.) The My Passport series looks great (see photo) and the day I bought it, one of my cats happened to knock it off the desk, but it was undamaged. The indentured factory workers in Thailand working for WD's subcontractor seem to have done a good job. Default File-Size Limitations There is just one basic problem with this drive, namely that it uses a file system architecture called Fat32. This is to make it compatible for both Windows and Mac. (It also works with Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux.) Unfortunately the Fat32 file system imposes a file size limit of 4.0 GB per individual file. That may have been adequate back in the day, but nowadays that's less than, say, a super high definition camera puts out in a second. Anyway, if you are a copying a file bigger on to your drive, the transfer will be interrupted and you'll be left with an incomplete 4.0 GB file on your USB drive. Not good! So you need to give Fat32 the pink slip and the way to do it is to reformat your USB drive. Here are the instructions on how to do it if you are using Ubuntu, the free and excellent operating system from Africa. (If you are using an inferior and outdate operating system such as Mac O/S or Windows, search around for your respective formatting utilities.) Formatting Instructions I searched around on the web for an easy way to do it, and all the results pointed me to a utility called Gparted, or Gnome Gparted. This may be an excellent piece of software, but for me it was as good as a pile of organic fertilizer. I wasted an hour trying to delete, unmount, and reformat, and got nothing but errors. The solution turned out to be surprisingly easy, quick, and error-free. Here are the step-by-step instructions. 1. Plug the thing in. Insert the USB cable into both the drive and your computer's USB. It should show up on your Desktop as "My Passport." 2. Unmount it. Open a terminal and, first of all, check that the drive is found at /dev/sda1. Type something like this: cd /dev/sda1
ls -ltr If everything is OK, execute the following command to unmount it. sudo umount /dev/sda1 The unmount command is called "umount" and not "unmount". Don't ask about the missing "n" and get over it. 3. Format away. Needless to say, formatting will delete everything on the drive. Here's what to type. sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 This command formats your USB drive with a file system called ext3. I know nothing about ext3 except that it works with Ubuntu and doesn't have any silly limitations for the sizes of individual files. 4. Mount the drive. Unplug, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in. Instead of coming up as "My Passport", the drive will now show as "usbdrive." The permissions on your freshly formatted drive may limit it to root, rendering it useless if you are dragging and dropping, so change that. (If your username is nick then type "chown -R nick /media/usbdrive".) You're done! Now you can back up all your big archives and full-length movies even while on the go.
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Contributor's Note
For your information, the data transfer on my system takes slightly less than a minute per gigabyte. About 4 minutes to backup the entire contents of all my websites - not bad!
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Mine's black but you can get other colors.
PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
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The copyright for this content entitled "Using "My Passport" USB Storage on Ubuntu" has been specified by the contributor as:
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This intel was contributed by nick
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May, 2012
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