SDCard as a work drive?

[Sly]

My laptop has an SD card slot and everytime i put a card in, it's identified as drive E:

Would it be okay to semi-permanently put in a 16GB card in there and use it as my work drive? Data's gonna be written there every time i recompile and save. This way in the event of a harddrive crash (it's a laptop, there's a relatively good chance it's gonna get dropped) i'll still have all my important files intact.

Is this a practical idea? Or would the sdcard just break down faster? I don't know much about these things so i'm not sure what they can handle.

 

[unhappy_mage]

It should work okay, if somewhat slowly. A better strategy would be using a version control system: keep a current working copy on your hard drive, but keep a Subversion (or some other system: CVS, Mercurial, Git, etc etc... but SVN is easy) repository on the SD card or an external server that gets backed up. When you make a change you want to keep, you check it into the repository, and it's kept safe there.

Another advantage of version control on an external server: you can collaborate with teammates. Each of you can make changes, and the changes will either be integrated automatically if SVN can figure out how to, or it'll let you merge the changes manually if there are overlaps.

 

[Sly]

Thanks i'll look into this version control system. Maybe there's one that automatically back's up my data. Currently, after a major modification, i rename the directory into the new version, run the directory through winrar, then save it on another pc, and also upload it to an ftp server. I was kinda hoping i wouldn't have to keep doing all that if i were to put it in what is basically a 1 inch diskette or atleast add another level of recovery. (Thumbdrives get disturbingly hot and cd's are cumbersome so they're out).

In other words, i'm too lazy to do constant backups so i'm looking at saving right into SD Cards as an alternative

 

[Shaggy3zx]

Should work out well...I have helped several friends setup backups that run to usb thumbdrives; sd cards are basically the same technology. You can also use a program to schedule backups so you don't have to do all that work manually. I like Cobian Backup but there are many other alternatives. Incidentally, Cobian will schedule, compress and ftp the backups for you automatically. Also if you are coding you really should get a version control system running...just repeating that for emphasis.