Cheapest SDHC reader

Just got this one in the mail, and it's working perfect!

For only $1.52 including (free) shipping, you get a great & tiny USB SDHC reader. Which is a both easyer and faster way to extract i.e. photos from your digital camera. Works perfectly!

Click here to get it :)

Update 13.january 2013: Seems like the old version is sold out. This should be the exact same version! Go for it! :)

From the site:

"- Supports SD, DV-RSMMC(MMC MOBILE), MMC, MiniSD(with adapter), MICRO SD(with adapter), T-FLASH(with adapter)
- Operating system: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/Mac os 9.1 or above"

..and yes, it works in Linux as well :) Plug-and-play!

UUID, Fstab and Automatically mount USB Drive

Finally found a solution on how to make my Linux (Debian):
A) Remember the unique USB drive(in my case a Western Digital Mirror Edition), and where to mount it
B) Automatically mount it when connected

First you have to identify your usb drive, make sure it is connected and you know the device name, in my case:
NoMore:/home# blkid /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: UUID="6494BFE994BFBC3C" LABEL="My Book" TYPE="ntfs"
NoMore:/home#
As you see my drive has a unique ID. This is what we are gonna use in fstab instead of the device name. Smart huh? :) This way we avoid the problem of changing device names when plugging stuff in and out.

Next in fstab, make a line like this:
UUID=6494BFE994BFBC3C /home/user/DiSK/ ntfs-3g defaults,auto,umask=000,users,rw 0 0
Make the changes you need, but make sure you use your correct UUID(and remove the "") and it is set auto like above.

Next check if it works by typing:
mount -a
The -a parameter means it shall mount everything set to auto in fstab. If it works, umount your drive and let's continue:

Ok, make sure you got udev installed. This is what's gonna automaticly mount our drives when new ones are detected. Make a new file;
NoMore:/home# nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-mount.rules
And add the following line:
SUBSYSTEM=="block", run+="/bin/mount -a"
Just make sure it uses the correct path to the mount command.
Next restart udev:
NoMore:/home# /etc/init.d/udev restart
Now unmount(umount) your drive, unplug it and try it out.

Error mounting NTFS in Linux

I have recently bought a Western Digital (WD) Mirror Edition 2TB, which I run in raid in order to offer me a really good backup solution for all my pictures and hd-videos from my SLR and important documents. The system is delivered with a NTFS system, which I knew obviously might cause some problems with Linux. As predicted, it happened today. I was just going to do a routine dismout (umount) and connect it to another computer when I ran into problems trying to unmount it. So I did a "umount -l" on the drive, which I apparently never should have.

Later when trying to mount the drive again in Linux (Windows always handles this stuff perfect), I got the following errors:

[root@nomore /]# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read of MFT, mft=10 count=1 br=-1: Input/output error
Failed to read vcn 0x4: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

So as instructed I connected the drive up to my computer running Microsoft Windows thinking the chkdsk /f command would fix it, but without luck. Tried dismounting properly aswell but it still refused to work.

But I found a solution. Go into "My Computer" while the drive is connected, right click on the drive, select "Properties" head to the "Tools" tab and under Error-checking click "Check now". Remember to tick both the options you get, and let it finish. This might take some time. For my 1TB USB drive it took a couple of hours. When finished, dismount the drive properly in Windows. I don't know if it matters, but just to be sure I dismounted it both with the WD tools and the windows plug&play manager.

I also rebooted my laptop running Linux, before I tired reconnecting. This time it worked perfectly again :) Thank god!

How to backup your data, 4 solutions

Backup backup backup! Keep that in mind. Sooner or later your computer will meet the dead end and there is pretty much no way back if you haven't backed up your data.

Here I will give you 4 easy solutions for backup up your data.
1.) Online backup! Get yourself an account at adrive.com. Here you get 50GB of storage for free, which is a great service. Fast, easy and free!
2.) Harddisk backup. Probably the fastest and easyest. Go buy a external USB or NAS drive with 500-1000GB of storage, and you are set. If you want 100% safety, you can buy the Western Digital Mirror edition which will mirror your data in a RAID system on 2 disks, which of course is safer then 1.
3.) Blu-ray/DVD/CD Backup. DVD and CD media is pretty cheap, and now that Bluray also is entering the private market this could also be a solution.
4.) USB memory drive. The space is limited, though the drive itself is very small. Somewhere around 16-32GB is the max today, which can be very limited, and the flash drives is not the most reliable media available.