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!

  • Bogasse
    13·
    6 months ago

    Although 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).