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!
toothbrush ( @toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 22•2 months agoI recommentd ext4. Its extremely stable and easy to manage. Btrfs, zfs etc. is overkill for a pure data drive imo.
Bogasse ( @Bogasse@lemmy.ml ) 13•2 months agoAlthough it depends of the backup format :
- If you store compressed tarballs they won’t be of any benefits.
- If you copy whole directory as is, the filesystem-level compression and ability to deduplicate data (eg. with duperemove) are likely to save A LOT of storage (I’d bet on a 3 times reduction).
mbirth ( @mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk ) 5•2 months agoThis! And I’d probably add par2 parity files - just in case some bitrot happens.
Laser ( @Laser@feddit.de ) 6•2 months agoI can’t tell if this is actual advice or irony
Samueru ( @Samueru@lemmy.ml ) 14•2 months agoBtrfs
Papamousse ( @Frederic@beehaw.org ) 6•2 months agoagree, and it compresses automatically, can be useful for some backup
tiny ( @tiny@midwest.social ) English14•2 months agoIf your Linux distro is using btrfs you can format it to btrfs and use btrfs send for backups. Otherwise the filesystem shouldn’t be to big if a deal unless you want to restore files from a Windows machine. If that is the case use ntfs
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.
terminhell ( @terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 2•2 months agoAre you sharing this drive with windows machines? It may be better to go exfat or something more neutral in that case.
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…
kbal ( @kbal@fedia.io ) 5•2 months agoI’d use ext4 for that, personally. You might also consider using full-disk encryption (redhat example) if there’s going to be any data on there you wouldn’t want a burglar to have. Obviously it wouldn’t do much good if you don’t encrypt the other disk as well, but having a fresh one to try it out on makes things easier.
www-gem ( @wwwgem@lemmy.ml ) 4•2 months agoThere was just a similar post here. You may find interesting clues there as well.
WarmApplePieShrek ( @WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English2•2 months agoext4 is the linux equivalent of ntfs
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ( @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English2•2 months agoBuck the trend, put APFS on those bad boys.
downhomechunk [chicago] ( @downhomechunk@midwest.social ) English2•2 months agoOr, kick it old school with reiserFS
Not bad idea.
LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 2•2 months agoWell, given the current state of the Open Source driver, I think it is a bad idea.
Although, I guess if you can tolerate closed source….
I was kidding…