Mobile storage for emergencies

Sometimes it happens. The stars misalign, your karma takes a beating, and the powers that control the universe decide, “Things are going to break today.” When this happens to me, the powers usually pick a time when I’m in my car with a full day's schedule. The cell phone rings, and I learn about problems at the office. After the inevitable skyward fist-shaking and hair-pulling, there’s nothing to do but reschedule everything and deal with the problem at hand. That’s when a well-equipped systems administration emergency toolkit comes in handy.

My kit has several components, but one of my recent favorites is a new Procom ProMobile USB hard disk. These things absolutely rock! Since I control the expense accounts in my company, it was fairly easy to convince myself to purchase the 60GB version, on the assumption that most user desktops are configured similarly and that too much space is always better than too little.

What makes the ProMobile and similar devices so fantastic is a mature implementation of USB. The ProMobile supports both USB 1.1 and 2.0. When connecting to machines based on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, the host box simply recognizes the Procom as soon as it's plugged in, pops up a little dialog box saying it's found some new USB hardware, and then assigns it a drive letter. Pow! You’ve got 60GB of spare storage attached to a host, regardless of whether that box is connected to a network at the time or not.

The ProMobile also ships with Second Copy 2000, copy management software that you can run once the disk is installed. This allows users to schedule disk-based backups, including initial copy location, copy destination, and scheduling features. Second Copy is automatically configured for iterative backups, meaning that subsequent backups only copy files that have changed since the last backup.

For the system administrator’s emergency toolkit, Second Copy really isn’t much help. I use my ProMobile to recover machines that have suffered a severe crash, usually caused by a user with too many permissions and enough spare time to install miscellaneous software.

The ProMobile lets me quickly save important desktop and data files, and then get to work reconfiguring the PC with no worries about causing more damage. If anything goes wrong, I can simply re-install the OS and the basic (and proper) application set, then re-install the user’s files from the ProMobile. No muss, no fuss.

Recently, I tried using the Procom as an image destination. This works just fine with Norton Ghost Console. The console treats the ProMobile as any other drive, so your only issue is USB throughput, and that’s not a big deal with USB 2.0. For other emergency situations, such as a remote office that’s suffered not only disk crashes but also a disconnection from the network, a ProMobile can easily be infused with multiple disk images. The systems administrator can then quickly make a house call and re-image machines locally. This could be done with a local workgroup that has a copy of Ghost Console installed or simply by attaching a ProMobile with Ghost Console to a working PC and managing the re-imaging from there.

For about $350 on the street, my 60GB ProMobile is pure gold when things get tight. For real serious storage hogs, there’s even a 250GB-capable ProMobile 3.5. These are definitely tools worth checking out if you’re one of the many who jump when the car phone rings.