Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives?

Posted by timothy on from the just-mirror-to-the-internet dept.

rufey writes "I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a monthly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations." Read on for the rest, and offer your advice on the best filesystem for this application. "Namely, the file size on a FAT32 filesystem is limited to 4GB (4GB less 1 byte to be technical). I have some files that are well over that size that I want to store, mostly raw DVD video. I'll primarily be using these drives on a Linux-based system, and initially, with a Western Digital Live TV media player. I can access a EXT3 filesystem from both of these, and I'm thinking about reformatting to EXT3. But on Windows, it requires a 3rd party driver to access the EXT3 filesystem. NTFS is an option, but the Linux kernel NTFS drivers (according to the kernel build documentation) only have limited NTFS write support, only being safe to overwrite existing files without changing the file size). The Linux-NTFS project may be able to mitigate my NTFS concerns for Linux, but I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable. At some point I'd like whatever filesystem I use to be accessible to Apple's OS X. With those constraints in mind, which filesystem would be the best to use? I realize that there will always be some compatibility problems with whatever I end up with. But I'd like to minimize these issues by using a filesystem that has the best multi-OS support for both reading and writing, while at the same time supporting large files."

6 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The solution.. by dieselpawn · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Irregardless, I think you're way better off with this approach vice trying to find the magical widely supported cross platform file system with large file capacity.

    What's the difference between irregardless and regardless?

  2. Re:The solution.. by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Irregardless, I think you're way better off with this approach vice trying to find the magical widely supported cross platform file system with large file capacity.

    Please take note, irregardless is not a word!

    Thank you.

    --
    The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
  3. Re:PSA by dotgain · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    If you were a native English speaker, you'd have picked up that I'm not interested in whether people think a certain word is valid or not. There would be dozens of words and idioms that always cause so much pointless debate here (see below).
    While I understand what they mean, and never pull anyone up for using them, I would also never use them myself, just to avoid what's happened here: Almost the entire first page of comments are completely pointless to anyone wanting to read about filesystems

  4. Re:PSA by polemistes · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Yes, my understanding of English is quite good enough that I was able to see your point. I was just tempted to add to it, by examplifying...

  5. Re:Please read this by RedWizzard · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    These little things are a) very helpful everyday things, value of which you realize only after loosing them

    How many o's are there in "lost"? Use the same number when writing "lose". How many o's are there in "goose"? Use the same number when writing "loose".

  6. Re:The solution.. by Gax · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You're words are truthy enough, but your assuming that synergistic words like irregardless don't have impacts on english as we know it. The facts is that people will use words like that wether we like it or not. This is truely, the case when it comes to American's use of language. Sadly, theirs very little we, as people far more litterate than the average people, can really do about that. If people used grammer checkers, then you and me would not see so many people authoring bad words and having a negative affect on english as it is known and practised today but should be editted and spokened tomorrow.

    Er... Why is this insightful? It's full of (intentional) errors. It should be +5 funny.