Backup part 1

Lately I have moved every piece of data I treasure the most (images, documents etc) to a SubVersion repository to ease maintaining such as trivial backup procedures to a remote location. Things like these just turn out to be a lot easier when everything is gathered in the same location on your harddrive and when you get full revision history of all your Word documents as well - why haven't I done this years ago? Hmmm...

Anyway - I have bought an external harddrive on which I want to store a backup of my repository on a nightly basis. This way I will always be able to take with me the latest documents and images whenever I feel like it. I started whipping up a Robocopy of the repository but somewhere along the way it started saying "Out of disc space"... On a 250Gb harddrive that is.

A little debuggin revealed that I have never formatted the disc so it was delivered with a default FAT32 partition... This way files can never be larger than 4 GB and that really sucks when one of my Subversion revisions contained all my images which grossly exceeds that size... So as we speak I am moving everything away from the external drive (I have of course cluttered it with secondary things like audio, videos, loads of PSD's and other stuff which doesn't take up space AT ALL...) so I can reformat the drive to NTFS.

Lessons learned:

1. Check before you do anything that your source drive is NTFS (not so obvious but it should take you 5 seconds to check and verify that you don't get caught with one leg on each side of the creek).
2. Possibly you could add smaller portions of data - a 4GB revision is indeed a lot of data
3. Write PackardBell (the harddrive vendor) and ask the sales departement why the heck they are shipping stuff with ancient partitions? "Backward compatibility" - I know I know but at least put a large yellow sticker on the disc if you decide that you still want to support systems like Windows 98 ;o)