40
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by wallmenis@lemmy.one to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Hello all,

I have recently bought an external 4tb drive for backups and having an image of another 2tb drive (in case it fails). The drives are used for cold storage (backups). I would like a prefference on the filesystem i should format it. From the factory, it comes with ntfs and that is ok but i wonder if it will be better with something like ext4. Being readable directly from windows won't be necessary (although useful) since i could just temporarily turn on ssh on the linux machine (or a local vm) and start copying.

Edit: the reason for this post is also to address an issue i had while backing up to an ntfs drive on linux. I had filesystem corruptions (thankfully fixed by chkdsk on a windows machine) and I would like to avoid that in the future.

Edit2: ok I have decided I will go with ext4. Now I am making the image of the first 2tb drive. Wish me luck!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] wallmenis@lemmy.one 2 points 6 months ago

I use fedora 40 kinoite which uses btrfs but i am not sure i trust it enough for this data. Also forgot to mention in original post that I had some problems when overwriting files in ntfs which caused corruption. Thankfully chkdsk on a windows machine fixed that but I wouldn't like for that to happen again when backing up from a linux machine.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 months ago

NTFS has never been well supported on Linux. Any native filesystem will be fine.

[-] terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago

Are you sharing this drive with windows machines? It may be better to go exfat or something more neutral in that case.

[-] wallmenis@lemmy.one 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah but I'd rather have something with a journaling system that might make recovery easier. I don't have any issue with temporarily connecting the drive to my pi and then moving the files via sftp (or spinning a vm via hyper-v/wsl). Also I don't have much experience with CoW filesystems like zfs and btrfs and I am scared to mess with them in case I cause data loss by accident. So ext4 it is...

this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
40 points (95.5% liked)

Linux

48099 readers
719 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS