USB Drive Trouble

[MikeH30]

I am new Linux user and have been manually backing up ( copy and paste ) my business critical directories (until I can figure out tarring and using CRON) to an attached USB drive. My directories are about 40 gigs. They contain Access database files, back up images of workstations, faxes ( PDF's and TIFF's), and misc docs. The copy process times out after a few minutes and not all my files are copied. I am running SUSE Enterprise Server 10. Can anyone tell me why it is timing out and how to fix it? Thanks.

[oz]

I'm totally guessing here, but there is a 2 GB limit on files going to FAT partitions, so if you have any that large or bigger, maybe that's what's causing the time out. If that's it, you could use another filesystem such as ext2/3, or NTFS to get around the barrier.

[MikeH30]

Thanks for the reply. I will look into that. Is there a difference between backing up to an attached USB device and a networked device ( another PC or SAN)? Why do I not have an issue when backing up to a shared drive on another PC?

[oz]

Why do I not have an issue when backing up to a shared drive on another PC?

So, you are saying that the shared drive is using FAT as the filesystem, but it doesn't time out? If that's the case, I'm not sure why it would work since the 2GB file size limit would apply.

[MikeH30]

No. The shared drive is NTFS ( its a Windows XP PRO SP2 machine).

[oz]

Like I said in my first post, the barrier does not apply to NTFS, so maybe that's why you aren't having the problem using the shared drive.

[oz]

I should add here that if the USB drive is not formatted with the FAT filesystem, none of what I said above applies. That's why I said I'm just guessing about what the problem might be.

[MikeH30]

I formatted the USB drive FAT32 in YAST. That was the only way I could write to it while attached to my Linux box. I apologize for the confusion. I never thought that the file system ( FAT32 or NTFS ) would have an impact on data transfer.

[oz]

Not sure, but I think it might be a 4GB limit on FAT32, so if you have any files larger than that, your transfer might stop at the 4GB limit.

[oz]

Here ya go, take a look here:

Windows Article - Welcome