file system format of backup HD

[Member blur13]

Hi!

What file system do you guys use for your backups? It’s been bothering me for a while now (why can’t everyone just settle on ONE standard…). I have about 500 GB worth of data I want to backup to an external HD. Ideally, it’d be nice to be able to access it from ANY computer. So that seems to imply FAT32. However, it has the 4 GB per file limit. I don’t think that will affect me too much. On the other hand its also a rather old file system, so not sure how reliable it is. Anyone got any experience with this?

thanks!

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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“Backups” is a pretty loose term for my use cases. I have many system images on different computers, and I have a pretty large collection of USB drives (the most current backup source) and a collection of CD and DVD drives for really OLD hardware. I seldom backup user files in the usual way, but I have copies of critical config files, including my .bashrc, xresources, emacs config, etc. that are in Email directories, also replicated in different Email agents.

That’s a pretty unusual way, but I can get to most of my stuff through either physical devices or network access, and therefore no single source of failure will take my environment 100% down. I also have Linux and Chromebook environments, providing more than one OS environment too.

My lone conventional backup are a couple backups on removable drives.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator BobC]

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This is 3 or 4 year old ideas, but if you mean MS systems consider NTFS and EXFAT. They aren’t great with Linux, but you should be able to access them from either system.

I suppose the most important thing is to setup the one that looks best, and TEST, TEST, TEST before you actually need it, not wish you had later.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by BobC.

[Member blur13]

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Linux and MacOS only supports reading of NTFS files. Windows can’t even read ext4 files. I’d like to be able to read and write from Linux, MacOS and Windows. So I guess that leaves FAT32. Thats standard for thumb drives. I’m wondering if anyone has tried using FAT32 for 500+ GB hard drives?

[Anonymous]

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Hi blur13,

You could use exfat filesystem. It is in the Debian repos for Bullseye/antiX-21 and is
native on MS windows 7 and 10. It needs the newer 5.10 kernel or higher for linux.

exfat wikipedia

how to use exfat fs on linux

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

[Moderator BobC]

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I use NTFS all the time to store my data in a big partition. For example, I store my ISO files there.

[Member blur13]

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BobC, are you able to get read-write support for NTFS from Linux?

[Moderator BobC]

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It was difficult to answer because I will not make any major changes to my main system to help test. I’ve found that sometimes things I mess with unintentionally end up in a mess, and then it can be difficult to get back to normal.

I do have a 2nd laptop that I had left bootable with Windows 10, and so I did a fresh install of antiX 21 64 bit to it, and used gparted to add an ntfs partition, then went and added it to the /etc/fstab, and rebooted. I then used a root window in zzzFM to mount the drive and change the permissions to make it accessible. I was then able to read and write files to it.

One thing I’ve always not known how to do is to automatically mount my ntfs partitions at boot, because I never figured out how, but other than that, it works fine.

I didn’t need to add any packages to make it work.

[Member blur13]

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Check out the other post I started about mounting drives, the udevil command in the startup file actually worked to make it mount at startup.

[Member blur13]

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And thank you for taking the time to perform the read/write test for NTSF! Very kind and helpful!

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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This explains it, at least with respect to recent kernels; not sure if this has quietly been back-ported or not…

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ntfs-support-gets-a-significant-boost-in-linux-kernel-5-15/

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Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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Anonymous wrote:

how to use exfat fs on linux

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

This is interesting… Is exfat support not included by default in antiX 21? Through exfat-progs, instead of exfat-utils? Or they are independent implementations, not exactly the same?
Any insight would be appreciated…
Thanks and Regards…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

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