I picked up a 250 Gig Western Digital Passport portable hard drive to keep a backup copy of my file vault home directory, among other things while I travel next week, in the somewhat-likely event something disastrous happens to my laptop.
I really like how small and portable the drive is, along with it's USB bus powered interface. There's no futzing around with wall warts and power supplies, it truly is plug and play.
I also really like that my PS3 recognizes the device, since I've transfered my entire iTunes library over to it (Huzzah, Option-Starting iTunes to select a library!). All of my H.264 AVC movies play right off of the drive on my Playstation 3 as well, which is really nice and convenient.
Copying some rather large files, specifically a 7 gig ASR Golden Master image of my demonstration PowerBook leopard OS, and the actual Leopard ISO image itself, I ran into a file size limitation of FAT32. Of course, I knew FAT32 didn't support large files, but I've just been spoiled in recent years by things like this "just working."
I didn't want to reformat the small drive, because that would surely mean my Playstation 3 would no longer recognize the file system, so instead I opted to create a sparsebundle HFS+ formatted disk image, exactly like I would do manually for
Leopard File Vault images.
The end result is that each "band" in the sparse bundle image will satisfy the limitations of FAT32, while providing a nice, secure and robust HFS+J file system to store all of the "big files" I need to carry with me.
Long live robust Disk Imaging Frameworks.
The only catch is that these files are only accessible on Mac OS X Leopard machines now, but that's not a huge problem for me. Especially traveling to the MacWorld conference.
