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im using a ubuntu 13.10 Server. I want to switch off the 2nd HDD completely and only power it up once a week to back up the system+data from the 1st HDD. I know how to use crontab, but I dont know how to switch off/on a HDD.
P.s. can you recommend a good incremental backup tool/script?
hdparm is probably what you want, it can control basically any aspect of your hard drives that you need. Invoked as hdparm -S [value] /dev/hda can control time until disk is put into standby/idle mode, and you should use the man page to check out other options you may find useful.
I use rsync to manage all my incremental backups over ssh to a remote server, and can thoroughly recommend it to you for backup purposes.
