USB Hard Drive Help

[Noobsauce]

I have a issue, I have read that it is impossible to connect a single USB Hard Drive to 2 different PC's or Servers for Back Up with out the use of Ethernet Cable. I want to DL the backups faster then the standard network 10/100, thus the reason for USB 2.0. Any Ideas or Products that you could reccomend would be great.

[Sparda]

You can't connect a USB device to two computer at the same time unless the device actively supports this. You could use a USB switching HUB, but the switching is usually a manual 'press a button' process. You probably could wire a controller of some nature to the switch button there by making it scriptable.

Do you keep other backups besides this hard disk? If not, you need to do that as well. Local storage is ok for a daily snapshot, but you need to keep your weekly/monthly snapshots remote and inaccessible from the server.

[Noobsauce]

Is there anyway to Set up a KVM USB switch to run on a timer... like I want one server to run backups from 2am - 4am and the other to run from 430am to 630 am... would there be a product out there that would allow a KVM to work off a timer?

[ArkNinja]

What you might be able to do (and this is purely speculation) is splice the USB cable into two different cables and plug both of them into the two computers and script it so that it backs up at whatever time, then removes it from the devices list and when its time to backup, add it back. This is purely speculation as I stated above, but who knows, it may work.

[MRGRIM]

Buy a NAS or see if there is something similar to a wireless print server (I imagine there is)

[SWFu]

Buy a NAS or see if there is something similar to a wireless print server (I imagine there is)

I've these:

Linksys NSLU2

Fonera 2.0N

No Gigabit on either though.

[Deveant]

Buy a NAS or see if there is something similar to a wireless print server (I imagine there is)

He says he wants to use the speeds of USB.

Though a free option, if the two computers are connect via network, you could connect the USB to one of them, and easly write a script to copy the HDD, WOL the other computer, wait for computer to start, pass the backup via LAN to the other PC.

[SWFu]

http://www.usbswitch.com/

Ignore the video it looks like its just for a manual switch.

EDIT: You need to install software to monitor which computer is using it. Apears to be only for printers in the PDF manual.

Theres someone using one of these at Amazon for a USB HD in the reviews. Surely you could setup a schedule to switch the drive a before backup.

[moonlit]

Something like http://www.usb-over-ethernet.com/ might help here (not the only products which does this, but the first I happened to stumble across). I don't know if you can access the devices simultaniously though, so a little research may be req'd.

[Noobsauce]

What you might be able to do (and this is purely speculation) is splice the USB cable into two different cables and plug both of them into the two computers and script it so that it backs up at whatever time, then removes it from the devices list and when its time to backup, add it back. This is purely speculation as I stated above, but who knows, it may work.

One of my friends also came up with this same Idea... It might work and it is worth a try... I will keep you posted on it. Thank you

[Bredex]

i have the same problem just on ubuntu, and i found the same software for Linux - http://www.net-usb.com/ . Have anybody tried this utility? Any experience?

[Jason Cooper]

What is the OS running on the two servers you want to back up to the same disk?

You could just plug it into one server and share the drive with the other server (If your network interfaces on your servers support gigabit Ethernet then invest in a gigabit switch so they can speak to each other faster).

Then again if you could just by a second USB drive to backup to for about the same price as upgrading your servers connections.

[hexophrenic]

What about one of these?

http://www.belkin.com/networkusbhub/