What's the right filesystem for your portable backup drive?
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 71.131.206.46]
on April 16, 2008 08:53 PM
I'm not sure why the author says NTFS-3G write support is problematic. I haven't seen any issues other than lack of ACLs support, which most home users aren't likely to be using anyway.
Also, if you can partition your external device, simply set it up to take both FAT32 and ext3 file systems. I have my internal hard drives set that way - several partitions for files that need to be accessed by Windows, the rest by my day-to-day Linux.
Also the risk that your bootable live CD isn't going to work is fairly rare. More likely than a scratched disk is that some unusual hardware on the other PC you're booting on isn't supported. Most of the time you're going to be recovering on your own machine, not somebody else's anyway. So that issue is rare. You solve scratched disk problems by having more than one copy. It's not rocket science.
In the end, the obvious solution is "bare metal restore": make a bootable image of your OS partition to several CDs or DVDs, and backup the rest of your data separately on your external device. That way you'll always have a bootable recoverable OS, and then your backups can be recovered with the same OS. The same applies to any live CD - make multiple copies.
It really isn't rocket science. The hard part is remembering to do this regularly as your OS changes, and setting up an automated backup system that really does grab everything correctly.
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What's the right filesystem for your portable backup drive?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 71.131.206.46] on April 16, 2008 08:53 PMAlso, if you can partition your external device, simply set it up to take both FAT32 and ext3 file systems. I have my internal hard drives set that way - several partitions for files that need to be accessed by Windows, the rest by my day-to-day Linux.
Also the risk that your bootable live CD isn't going to work is fairly rare. More likely than a scratched disk is that some unusual hardware on the other PC you're booting on isn't supported. Most of the time you're going to be recovering on your own machine, not somebody else's anyway. So that issue is rare. You solve scratched disk problems by having more than one copy. It's not rocket science.
In the end, the obvious solution is "bare metal restore": make a bootable image of your OS partition to several CDs or DVDs, and backup the rest of your data separately on your external device. That way you'll always have a bootable recoverable OS, and then your backups can be recovered with the same OS. The same applies to any live CD - make multiple copies.
It really isn't rocket science. The hard part is remembering to do this regularly as your OS changes, and setting up an automated backup system that really does grab everything correctly.
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