[conspire] external storage recommendation

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Obviously I need an external drive of some sort.  USB interface would
> be simple, but probably slow to transfer videos.NAS should be faster.

I think you need to do a prototype test run.  Borrow some external USB2 
storage media, connect it to one of your laptop's USB ports, and time
the copy from the shell prompt of a pretty-large data set to it, from
the half-terabyte memory card.

Don't forget that, in practice, you'll probably be using something like
rsync to do update-type backups, backing up just the diff since the
previous backup.

Anyway, that exercise can help you decide whether the performance of
USB2-attached external backup storage is adequate.  If it is, you're
done.

[NAS:]

> Some models advertise automatic backup and other fancy stuff.  Might I
> have difficulties with that software and  Linux machine?  Or multiple
> machines?   Comments?

There are a lot of really crummy proprietary NAS units, like, without
prejudice towards equally bad ones, the Buffalo NAS things.  I would run
away from those.  OTOH, DIY open-source NAS can be fine.