May I ask which model of USB drive you're using, if it works reliably with Linux?
I was reading about these just last weekend, and surprised to hear that several of the current, big name brand USB hard drives seem to come with "clever" software, not necessarily easily removable, that means they don't work like a vanilla disk any more. The result is that operating systems without supplied drivers, such as Linux, won't necessarily be able to access the drives properly.
I have no way to tell how much of this is real and how much is down to misunderstanding, but it was a recurring theme and applied to multiple major vendors, so as appealing as this simple approach is, I don't really feel like trusting my critical back-ups to any of these drives until I've got some facts.
Seagate and WD drives have worked fine for me, both on ARM and x86.
WD drives detect a wd_ses device as well as the drive and I think that gives me LED control (great for turning off blinkenlights at night)
My main problem with backup drives at the moment is getting hdparm/power management settings to stick so the drives will spin down after an amount of time. I've had more luck with USB than ESATA in this case.
It's a Seagate Backup Plus 3TB. I believe Newegg had it on sale for $100 when I picked it up. Been using it for maybe 3 months now. So far so good.
The drive seems to have no problem spinning down. But I typically unmount and unplug when I'm not using it, just to be on the safe side.
I also looked into NAS, which is what I originally wanted to go with. But my concern was none of the cheap ones seemed capable or fast enough to do encryption.
I was reading about these just last weekend, and surprised to hear that several of the current, big name brand USB hard drives seem to come with "clever" software, not necessarily easily removable, that means they don't work like a vanilla disk any more. The result is that operating systems without supplied drivers, such as Linux, won't necessarily be able to access the drives properly.
I have no way to tell how much of this is real and how much is down to misunderstanding, but it was a recurring theme and applied to multiple major vendors, so as appealing as this simple approach is, I don't really feel like trusting my critical back-ups to any of these drives until I've got some facts.