By popular demand, I am posting my review of the Western Digital My Passport Essential Portable Hard Drive (250 GB model).
I've had a 60 GB WD Passport for a year or two now. Since I work a lot on two different computers (one with two operating systems) and I'm obsessive about backing everything up, this Passport has been very handy. I use it as the master filesystem and make sure that every file is backed up on at least one computer. I carry it with me wherever I go.
Since I need to reinstall Fedora 11 on both computers (material, I suppose, for another review), I thought it might make it easier to pick up a new external hard drive. The storage technology has improved so rapidly; now I can back several different computer filesystems up on the same USB drive and still have plenty of space for maintaining the master filesystem. That way, if something goes wrong during the installation, I haven't lost anything.
So I cycled up to Staples yesterday and purchased the 250 GB model. The extra gigage is handy, but the annoying thing is that the root directory is called "My Passport". Everything these days is "My, My, My...", "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Friends". The worst thing about it is that we don't own any of it! It's all proprietary. The space in between "My" and "Passport" makes it more difficult to compose commands in Bash, but perhaps there are work-arounds.
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I am not sure that this will transfer to Fedora, but using Darwin with MacOSX, the book MacOSX Tiger for Unix Geeks, by Brian jepson and Ernest E. Rothman, published by O'Reilly, on pages 12 -14 there is a discussion of spaces in directory and file names.I don't know if this works on the Fedora bash kernel or not. But they say "To get around these spaces, you have two choices: escape them or quote the file or directory name.
To escape a space on the command line, simply insert a backslash (\) before the space. This also works with other special characters, such as a parenthesis.... Because they have meaning to the shell, special characters that must be escaped are * # ` " ' \ $ | & ? ; ~ ( ) < > ! ^. Here is an example of how to use a backslash to escape a space character in a file o directory name:
cd ~/Documents/My\ Shell\ Scripts
or you can use quotation marks around the file or directory name that contains the space, as follows :
cd ~/Documents/"My Shell Scripts" "
Further discussions in the book appear to be MAC specific.
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