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In today’s era of gigabyte files and optical drives, it seems kind of quaint to carry around backup copies of your data. But for bioinformaticiens, it’s not unheard of to shift gigabytes of data around, whether to visit other labs, or go to conferences, or do a short sabbatical somewhere. Whilst it might seem like a good idea to just ftp from your home base, this just isn’t possible for big datasets. Just watch sftp choke on 13% for a couple of hours. And while CD’s seem like a good idea, it’s only 256 MB, and they are a pain to write.
I’ve used it to carry around large movie-based powerpoint presentations, shift around large photo datasets for websites, transfer molecular-dynamics trajectories, and I’ve helped friends move their iTunes library from one computer to another. The absolute key to this piece of hard-wire is the absence of an external power supply. Sure, such drives are a little slower, and generally have less capacity, but frankly, there’s not much you can say with 500 GB that you can’t with 120 GB, at least on short notice. It saved my ass on an occasion when my laptop died just before a presentation at another lab. Gods be praised that I had a backup on my WP hard drive and so, I just turned up at the new lab with it, and plugged the drive into one of their computers. And voila! there’s my powerpoint presentation on their computer, complete with several hundred megabytes of movies. It felt just like the old days of carrying data on a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.
I am slowly starting to think of JungleDisk/Amazon S3 as a replacement for all physical backups. Have you checked this out?
I’m a strong believer in the external hard drive. It’s saved me on at least one occasion. The USB powered drives you mention sound even better. My closest alternative is the 1Gb USB keydrive I carry around. My presentations are usually much smaller than its capacity so I’ve found it handy for the situations you describe. The price of flash RAM is quickly dropping – I think you can pick multi-Gb keydrives these days for $20 making CDs (with their 800Mb capacity, BTW) and DVDs (4Gb capacity) obsolete.
This looks very promising, but it still depends on the internet to transfer data across, which is impractical for large datasets. I know of colleagues who use time on supercomputers to do big calculations. The second biggest headache after getting things to compile on the supercomputer is: how to bring the data back home. |
I am Bosco (email). I live in San Francisco. I am a postdoc researching the science of proteins. I write about performances, programming, books (of which I sometimes review) and other miscellanea. I make writing, pictures and software. Blogroll |
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So here’s my solution: buy a portable hard drive. But not just any hard-drive, get one that is powered solely by the