SD card with ReiserFS for backups
The hard drive on my laptop has occasionally been making some funny klicking noises recently, and I’m a bit worried it’s going to break down one of these days. So in addition to backups to an external HD and a USB stick, I bought a 4 GB SD card to just leave in the card reader.
I formatted this with gparted, first to ext3, then to ext2 (I wanted something that would preserve permissions), but after backup up some files to it (using rsync and rdiff-backup) I ended up with lots of input/output errors and bad superblocks and whatnot.
I then used gparted to make it ReiserFS, and that worked. One other thing that I did differently was that after formatting the SD card to ReiserFS, I removed the card, then shut down the machine and rebooted before reinserting the card and actually putting any data on it. I hadn’t done this for the ext* FS, no clue if it could have made a difference.
The filesystem works nicely and it seems quite a bit faster than both ext3 and ext2 (I have mostly small text files, and a few pdfs).
However, letting the card be automounted (by HAL, I assume?) resulted in occasional total freezes when mounting/ unmounting.
So I put a line into /etc/fstab
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /media/kate auto auto,user,rw,exec 0 0
and now I can just leave the card in.
However, the laptop then failed to suspend and resume properly. That was solved by putting a script each into /etc/acpi/suspend.d and resume.d to unmount and remount the card:
audrey:~$ cat /etc/acpi/suspend.d/01-umount-kate.sh #!/bin/sh /bin/umount /media/kate
and …
audrey:~$ cat /etc/acpi/resume.d/91-mount-kate.sh #!/bin/sh /bin/mount /media/kate && /bin/chown mpromber:mpromber /media/kate