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Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives?
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."
is to stop being so diverse! Pick a platform and stick with it!
Ok, in all seriousness.. here's what you do:
- buy yourself a cheap (~200) box
- hook all your drives to it
- use whatever file system you want (JFS, XFS would be my recommendation)
- share it over your zoo of a network using nfs, samba, etc..
As a bonus, your file server box could double as a media center, and replace your WD TV Live dealie.. (probably not though.. right)
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.
You also might want to consider RAID vs. your monthly sync. Yes, RAID isn't a backup.. but for something like this where
restoration would be possible, but just a pain in the ass.. mirrored raid can be a lot more convenient. You can always have
a third external to back up your irreplacable data on a semi-annual basis..
If you're like me, you won't be happy with the compromises you have to make when picking a multi-platform filesystem. I'd outline them, but you've done a great job of doing so above. So, what to do?
Get thee a cheap, cheap Linux box, format your drives EXT3, and all other machines access over the network. It's the only way you'll get the interoperability you want, without making compromises on max file size, cluster sizes, etc.
THat's what I use here. for MAC, there's NTFS-3G (free) or Paragon ($ but faster on writes).
I use NTFS on both my machines (Win/OS X/Linux) without any problems.
NTFS-3G is also available for Linux.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I personally go the other way. Sure, there's an Ext3 driver for windows, but from what I've seen it's not that good. On the other hand, I've used the NTFS driver on Linux quite a bit and it's worked pretty well. More importantly, I have confidence that the NTFS driver will continue to get better.
VLC can play rar-compressed-splitted files beautifully, So 4GB is not a very big problem
...ReiserFS. I hear it's killer.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
I wouldn't limit myself to a certain filesystem, I'd run a dedicated NAS like FreeNAS and share it over the network via SMB (windows), AFP (apple) and whatever for Linux - all set. Plus as mentioned above, you can run Firefly media server, a bittorrent server, a DAAP server (itunes sharing), etc (all included in FreeNAS. http://freenas.org/) on the same box. And since filesystems don't matter in this config, you can use ZFS to make a RAIDZ pool of your drives. It's what I do now.
fak3r.com
Via FUSE you'll get consistent features and useability across all 3 OSes. Of course moving zfs drives between those OSes isn't something I've tried, but in theory it should work fine.
Not what your asking for, but Id put a FBSD samba server up with ZFS drives. You can still mount them on other OSes later if need be via FUSE.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Honestly, if FAT32 won't do what you need, NTFS is pretty much where you'll need to go. NTFS-3g gives you stable read/write capability on Linux and OS X as a FUSE driver; in fact, many distributions have NTFS-3g in their repositories. There's also native NTFS write support in Snow Leopard if you want to risk turning it on. I personally haven't had any issues with it, but some people have encountered file corruption when using it, so you might want to be wary. It is worth noting, however, that many embedded devices won't read anything other than FAT. If you plan on hooking this drive up to, say, a DVD player to show pictures, NTFS won't work for you.
Like it or not, Microsoft file systems are the lingua franca of file transfer on portable drives these days, merely due to the installed base of Windows computers.
The Freelance Wizard
I have ~6TB on external USB drives and I've been doing this for a few years now. I have a few words of caution about NTFS. If you get an USB drive that for example spins down or if you turn your USB drive off without properly dismounting it (or if Windows crashes), you might see this line:
Delayed write failed!
And on two occasions that meant that Windows fucked up the file allocation table or whatever it's called under NTFS and I lost the _entire_ disk.
Windows loves getting its fingers into that table whenever you mount a USB filesystem. It's not like it tries to keep its write cache empty. Nooo.. every file access needs to be continuously recorded in that thing.
Anyway, be careful when you use NTFS on a USB drive. Alternatively use EXT3, which you can still mount under Windows using:
http://www.ext2fsd.com/
(Note that these experiences are under Windows XP, I have no clue if Vista or 7 does any better, I assume not.)
Not if you use a network filesystem, such as Samba and NFS for the Windows and MacOS machines. Then on the Linux fileserver side, use whatever filesystem you want, and any OS can talk to that server.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
yeah, i use linux and have my exteral drive formatted as NTFS
honestly, i cant recall having a single write-related problem and i do raw DVD video often enough. linx NTFS support has been solid for me for well over a year now.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
If proprietary filesystems are on the table, how about VxFS ?
Another possibility is to use FAT with cross-platform backup software. Maybe you don't need a filesystem at all: if this really is for backups... why not just create lots of extended partitions on the device and use TAR ?
AKA tar cf /dev/sdbXX -V 'VOLUME_A' /backup
That's crude and hard to keep organized, but also effective. Also, Some proprietary backup products that will work on a FAT filesystem, and not require large file support, even to backup large files
Or utilize a tool such as WINRAR that allows you to "split" a RAR file across multiple archives in chunks of a certain size, then store these files on a FAT filesystem.
FAT is the most cross-platform, oldest. But has known issues with fragmentation, and lack of journaling, effects reliability.
You could divide your backup volume into 2 partitions: one DOS/FAT partition with the bootable image and files required to 'load a virtual machine' that can see the files on the other partition in the preferred data format such as ZFS or FFS (e.g. pre-allocated eager zeroed thick VMware VMDK with 'split into 2gb files' enabled).
Then you just make sure the system you plug the drive into can boot a VM, with your "backup/file access environment"
As an alternative to an external disk that goes to multiple machines, this might cost some, but perhaps consider a backup server?
The advantages to this setup:
1: The server initiates the backups, and can warn you in case something can't be read.
2: Most backup software stores snapshots, and some deal with the full/incremental/different cycle by using synthetic full backups. This makes restores to a certain point in time pretty easy.
3: More sophisticated backup software allows you to transfer backup sets to another media. This way, you just plug in a drive, do a transfer, and you have an offsite archive.
4: If one of the backup client machines gets hacked or malware installed, existing data stored on backup media cannot be altered.
The disadvantages:
1: You will need an active computer which is significantly more expensive than a hard disk.
2: Amanda/Zmanda for open source, Retrospect, Backup Exec, for commercial. The software costs a hefty chunk of change.
3: You have to make extremely sure that the backup server box is locked down tight. If someone compromises your backup server, they got data of every box you have. If you can, perhaps consider buying a router to put the backup server behind and only allowing the vital ports incoming.
4: Backup servers should have some redundancy for stored data. Because there is so much data stored from multiple boxes, a failure of a drive hurts more than on a normal machine.
5: Restoring a machine may vary in difficulty.
Replace the silly little WD TV Live media player with a mITX system that's about the same size. Install Linux and XBMC and be done with it. You'll have the best possible media player on the planet, as much storage space in any configuration you want and the ability to expand everything when the time comes. No hassle, you'll have constant online backups available and you'll have a killer always-on media center.
If you need Linux/Mac/Windows interoperability then we recommend NTFS for both Linux and Mac users. Instead of the old NTFS kernel driver you may want to check our open source NTFS-3G. It has read/write, and tons of options:
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/
If you need just high-performance NTFS read/write, this is our offering for Mac users:
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
If you need high-performance for a commercial Linux application or device, you may want to check this:
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-commercial/performance/
Regards,
Mikko Välimäki
CEO, Tuxera Ltd
Personally I like Openfiler. It can be picky about the hardware though. With that said, the speed is great, and I can mount iscsi on linux and windows. Has been stable as hell for me to boot.
when logic fails, bullshit prevails
I go with ext3 for this personally. NTFS doesn't store *nix style filesystem permissions, and causes various other issues with you Linux systems. With ext3, you can store all your files with all of your permissions intact, the filesystem is mature and trustworthy, and you can still access all of the files from any operating system by simply connecting the drives to a dedicated fileserver machine (an older computer or small device works perfectly for this). Simply share your files via NFS, Samba and ftp (if you need ftp access for something like xmbc). Having a dedicated machine for this means you can also script your replication to the secondary drive, so that you only have to attach the drive for the mirroring process to take place.
This is the solution I've been using for about four years now, and it works great for me.
I have a Seagate 1TB USB drive and I used it both under Windows and Linux, so the FS is NTFS: /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
/dev/sdb1 1 121601 976760001 7 HPFS/NTFS
Disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa4b57300
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
I currently run Linux exclusively and I'm going to buy the new 2TB drives and I will format it with btrfs since I will only be using it under Linux, but I have had no problems reading and writing to the drive under Ubuntu 9.10 nor under Windows XP.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I have been through exactly the same thing, and NTFS is the way to go. My main machine is a Mac, but I format all my USB drives as NFTS (through NTFS-3G FUSE). Though this is slower than formating as FAT or HFS+, it is so much more portable, it wins out. Windows machines can read them. My WD TV box can read them. My Mac can read them. They can store more than 4G per file (indeed, I have all my DVD isos on them). Ok, they can't be read on other macs without installing NTFS-3G, but I've yet to need that. For me, I've never had any problem with NTFS-3G , it's extremely reliable.
My backup has been worked good for the last few years. I had a large windows tower filled with hard drives...
* One of my HDD was encrypted using Truecrypt.
* A scheduled Acronis task would image my OS drive to the encrypted drive.
* I have another encrypted HDD in one of these KINGWIN KF-91-BK trays (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121172)
* After Acronis was done, I would kick off a little batch file to mount the tray drive (which was encrypted) and run SyncBack Pro to mirror the encrypted source. Then dismount.
I just bought a few extra trays. Each month I sync all the other HDD in the system (including the encrypted drive) for my off-site backup. One flaw in my system was if one of the other "data drives" crashed, I would loose at most a month of changes. They were just music/videos and didn't change very much. I accepted this fault.
I out grew the tower and recently built a cheap unRaid box. Most if it should work the same, except now I have redundancy for all my drives in the case of a crash.
Which particular driver are you referring to? There are a few.
Personally, I use Ext2 IFS in Windows (it works for Ext3 too) and it is, hands-down, the stablest and best Ext2/3 Windows driver I've used. Every other one I've tried would have stability issues; with IFS I don't have to worry. (There's been precisely *one* time in pretty much years that the driver crashed on me, and that's when I was doing something weird and stupid; I don't remember what. But more importantly, it didn't do anything bad to the filesystem in that crash.)
NTFS-3G, which should come standard in most distros, should be able to read and write NTFS perfectly. It's considered very stable. That said, my personal solution to this problem was to use EXT2 and install EXT2IFS on my windows machines. I had a small FAT32 partition on the USB disk with the EXT2 driver installers for Windows and MacOS, so if I ever need to read it on another computer I don't have to download anything.
I format my external USB drives to ext3. Most of my machines are Linux anyway, and I can always plug the USB drive into my storage server and backup over Samba to any kind of drive supported by the storage server.
ext3 is pretty much stable and well understood. It just works. That's what I want for backup drives.
And my netbook has Ubuntu Linux on it, and ext3 performs well on the external USB drive there. I haven't tested NTFS over FUSE on the netbook, but I wonder about CPU overhead on the little Atom chip: it might be a little bit slow.
If you want a drive you can take over to your friend's house, and your friend just runs Windows or a Mac, then by all means NTFS.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Ignore this thread. Once you get past all the first post trolls, the rest of it mainly contains bickering over whether "irregardless" is a word or not. Slashdot at its finest, I know. So I'm jumping in at the top of the thread to warn you and save you the time.
As for which filesystem to use: It's a shitfight at the end of the day. OSS-NTFS is reverse engineered so you can never trust that it really is complete, nor that Microsoft will never bend/break it in the future. FAT32 sucks but is unquestionably the lowest common denominator. I like to use Ext2 for getting big files from Linux to Windows (I transfer a lot of DV files), but you have to install something on the Windows/Mac/etc. to use that. HFSplus support on Linux is fine, you just need to disable the journal on the Mac first.
Like I said, it's a shitfight. Learn the pros and cons of the main filesystems: NTFS, Ext-2/3 family, HFS, FAT32. Break them out as each situation merits. But with regard to NTFS and the specs changing: Microsoft have done it before and they'll do it again, just ask Norton Utilities. While my Windows PC is a very important part of my operation (I edit all my video on it), I don't use Windows for enough other things to justify using NTFS unless I'm forced to.
I haven't tried it but it looks like a good idea. http://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=36218&sk=MC71419
Format it ext3 and then share it SMB for any OS.
You are lucky, Ed Gruberman. Few novices experience so much of Ti Kwan Leep so soon.
I see quite many people here recommending ext3. Oh my. ext3 sucks for large files,
which is exactly what the submitter wants to use his setup for. Look into the crazy structures
("double indirect blocks") it uses. He should go with an FS that has sane data structures with
files >>4GB.
That kills most of the choices and leaves XFS, ext4, ZFS (only worth it if not used via FUSE,
i.e. in Solaris), and a couple more obscure ones.
I second the "forget OS portability, use a server" suggestion. There's great low-power, low-cost
hardware for this nowadays.
NTFS is recommended several times in response to this article and it troubles me. The next de facto portable filesystem standard is being determined by us in the same way mp3 was made a standard. Ask yourself if you really want to see NTFS become the standard? Personally I'd rather see a truly open filesystem become standard and I really don't want to see Microsoft have the leverage to make more patent threats. If you agree with me and have some integrity, please recommend an open standard.
I would recommend NTFS. I would also recommend that you get an open source program and compress the dvd's to approx. 700MB for up to 90 minutes and 1.4GB over 90 mins. H264/ac3 or Xvid are good codecs to use. Batch schedule the movies and let the system compress all night when you don't need the system. The reason for this is because dvd's take up a lot of wasted space because of the format. A compressed movie takes up far less space. I can store about 1000 movies on a 1TB drive and if a dvd is ever needed, I can recode a dvd. There is not much quality difference between a compressed movie and a dvd file. You can also convert the dvd's to .mov files but apple can read most H264 files or mp4 files. Many dvd players can read Xvid or Dvix files and others without the need for a dvd file.
For cd's, If you plan to burn several copies, then rip the cd's directly to .wav or .flac (lossless) files. mp3 files are like .jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each
time they are copied whereas lossless .wav or .flac files DO NOT regardless of how many times they are copied.
Dear AP,
I was pondering with a very similiar problem two years ago, when I bought my first terabyte-class external USB hard drive to my home server (old 800 MHz Duron). I was thinking exactly like you are thinking now, and decided FAT-32 would be the way to go. MISTAKE. Four important things stand out, that I want you to read:
Okay, those are my four vocal points. They could be in any order, because all of them are equally important reasons NOT to choose FAT-32! As it happened, after using the 0.5TB drive for 6 months with FAT-32, I bought more space (a new drive). This time there was no question about the filesystem. I made a small, few-sector long 200 MB FAT-32 partition to the beginning of the drive and downloaded all the latest Win32 EXT2 drivers there from different vendors, just for the really unplausible situation that I would ever want to mount these drives in Windows. Then I just made the rest Ext3. And, I am REALLY satisfied with the decision! Ext3 just work so sparklingly faster and better with Linux than FAT-32 ever does. Since then I have bought one more drive and did the same 200MB + 1TB thing. I will probably never use these drives in Windows, but it gives me a warm feeling to the heart that there's always a way if I should, even if the computer doesn't have an Internet connection.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: get a file server! It makes your life so much easier. Nowadays I am running a desktop computer with a 60 GB SSD drive and no HDD at a
The big problem with ReiserFS: Vendor lock-in.
Except that it's basically unusable now.
I don't know the details 100%, but the Ext2 IFS driver doesn't support Inodes that are larger than 128 bytes, according to the site you linked.
My understanding is that Ext3 defaults to 256 byte Inodes now. The only way to change it is to manually create the file system with some flags, no gui option, certainly not while I'm installing Fedora or Ubuntu.
I tried getting it to go but when I attempt to access the drives windows tells me it needs to be formatted before use. Not good!
Perhaps it will eventually be fixed, but I will agree with the GP, using NTFS from Linux has been rock solid for at least a couple years for me.
XFS was designed with media streaming in mind -- and designed for large file, high performance. It had a defragmenter to keep disks in optimal condition before Windows98 had come out (was one at the request of a large, customer who had an especially pathological case -- before that there was normally not considered a need for it).
Files can be 'normal', have up to and addition 256K of resource-fork related into (extended attribute info), AND you can have a real-time section that can allow for completely bypassing the file system. It was sufficiently fast for video even back when disks were 1/10th the speed they are now.
On it's native OS, it could handle multiple streamed data to the same disk and keep it separate by allocating the separate channels out of disparate allocation groups on disk. I don't know how that works on linux. Unfornately, on linux even under x64, file block sizes AFAIK, are still limited to 4K. XFS has a 64K limit, but under linux is hamstrung to 4k. Of course Windows NT allows 64K block sizes. But not linux...hmmm....very weird. XFS minimizes impact of linux's tiny allocation block size by using a extents which can be at least 256k -- but believe the actual limit is in megabytes. Been a while since I read that stuff...
Of course -- not to be linux centric, but have heard ZFS is pretty good, but no idea of how it compares for anything.
my 2 cents...
The fundamental problem lies in USB bridge chips which do not properly implement the cache management commands. Others have replied that you need to disable the write cache, and while that would be a solution, it is often impossible. Even with bridge chips that do support the cache disable command, some hard drives will not honor it anyway.
Most USB bridges simply lie about when data has been written, which makes it very difficult for a filesystem on top of it to make any guarantees. While it may not happen often, this can have disastrous results, as you have seen.
The copy on write nature of ZFS left it especially vulnerable to broken USB storage, and could easily leave you with a corrupted pool requiring manual intervention and a bit of luck to recover. Thankfully, the recent bits address this, and ZFS is now the only filesystem that I would trust on top of USB storage. Most other filesystems will survive without incident, but at the cost of some silent data corruption.
I know this comment will get lost in the sea of other comments, but my recommendation to you would be a hybrid solution.
Create a small partition (1GB would be overkill) and format it FAT32.
Create another partition for the rest of the drive (or however you please) with your choice of FS (I prefer XFS, personally).
Store the drivers(/utilties) for the FS you chose and store them on the FAT32 drive.
Some popular drivers/utilties for Windows are:
ext2fsd for EXT2 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/
rfstool for ReiserFS - http://freshmeat.net/projects/rfstool/
ltools for EXT2/EXT2/ReiserFS - http://www2.hs-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/software/ltools.html/
and so on and so forth (a simple google for "[FS] Windows Compatibility" usually works.)
Just my thoughts. :-)
Great feature would be data chacksums - for media collection on drive, I would like to get warning if there is any data loss. btrfs has this feature (between many others), when it is a bit more stable, than I will use it in similar scanario.
I ended up doing as most in this thread did. Networking.
I bought a BubbaII from http://www.excito.com/ its a small fan less linux box with 2x usb, 2x ethernet, and 2x extSata.
NB: NICs are gigEthernet, but they perform substantially slower than one expects. This according to the manufacturer, is by design to keen the temperature at a resonable level to accommodate the fan less design.
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
I've been using this for years, but I do get solid lockups with very large files (over 4GB) which has made me very nervous.. Any idea where I screw up?
Desktop and laptop are still WinXP (home) until I make up my mind what I'll replace it with (it's narrowed down to OpenSuSE or Mandriva), but for some use a Windows desktop is still more suitable (I'd love Paint.NET to run on Linux, for instance).
Insert
Create different partitions on external drive, one for example EXT3 and other FAT32. EXT3 would be large and FAT32 would be very small couple of megabytes. On smaller partition you would have EXT3 drivers for Windows machines. With this you would be able to access EXT3 from any machine. You could also try different file systems in same way.
NTFS is recommended several times in response to this article and it troubles me. The next de facto portable filesystem standard is being determined by us in the same way mp3 was made a standard. Ask yourself if you really want to see NTFS become the standard?
No, but that's not really relevant.
Personally I'd rather see a truly open filesystem become standard and I really don't want to see Microsoft have the leverage to make more patent threats. If you agree with me and have some integrity, please recommend an open standard.
Can't reconcile the contradiction in that request. There's no open standard that satisfies the need, so I would have to abandon my integrity to make a dishonest recommendation that I like for its openness. If I want to maintain my integrity, I need to make an honest recommendation that accords with the truth, even if it's an unpleasant truth. For the desired purpose, the sad truth is your best bet is NTFS. I wish that weren't so, I would hope that in a few years some open standard would emerge, but I'd be dishonest to answer with wishful thinking rather than fact.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This is the kind of topic that SHOULD be on slashdot. And no Im not being sarcastic. Something informational that might benefit everybody, dispite all the bickering in the subsequent posts! There's one thing you can count on with slashdot readers, dispite how arrogant most of us are, or how ignorant most are when it comes to politicial information - We usually know our shit when it comes to computer stuff! :)
I myself wanted a setup like this several months ago and settled on setting up 2 Ubuntu systems with internal 2TB hard drive. One at home and one at my remote location. I share the drive over my local network with Samba. (The drives themselves are formatted ext3 or ext4, but that hardly matters to the rest of the network once they are shared.) (To later support Mac OS X you could try getting afp working, but it will still happily mount samba also, which is what I do with my mac.) Which is fast enough to serve video, and means I don't have to lug a drive around the house. And I periodically run Unison to keep the systems in sync over SSH. Even pre-mirroring the drives, Unison takes a day or so to run the initial sync. But after that first run, the syncs are pretty quick. At the moment I am manually running the GUI Unison, but I plan on eventually switching to the command line version and automating it in a cron task.
I'd choose the file system based on the system I plan to Host it on. If the host is Windows, I'd go with NTFS. If the Host is Linux, I'd go with EXT2. Regardless of the hosting system and the drive format, you want to make sure you can access the shared contents of the drive from your other systems on your home network. Using this approach, you won't need to worry about third-party drivers.
AFAIK, Windows 7 doesn't make NTFS partitions it comes across into Dynamic volumes (which is probably what you mean by "enhancing"), which would make them unreadable on Linux.
Maybe the directories you were trying to access were NTFS versions of symlinks, "junctions"? I've had trouble using them in Linux, and I know Win7 has them in place for backwards compatibility ('C:\Documents and Settings' points to 'C:\Users', for example).
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
It has at least two other issues: it doesn't support ext3 journaling (so ext3 is treated as ext2), and it can't fsck (and because it doesn't support ext3, it can't do a journal replay either), which means that it can't mount a dirty volume until it is mounted by Linux.
Of all major operating systems, UNIX is the only one originally meant for gaming.
+ 1 for build a NAS. Your backup doesn't need to be very portable. I started out with FreeNAS, if you go this route ZFS would be the logical choice. I got pretty frustrated with this so rebuilt my NAS using Ubuntu and EXT3 - it made sense to me to use the native FS for the OS. I currently have 4 x 1TB internal drives in raid 5 (one spare). I use a USB drive to back this up. SMB internally and all the files are accessible by every OS I use. If I need to take files out and about there are good old USB sticks or portable drives. Mine are usually NTFS or FAT 32 because anything can read these - and of course there's always good old FTP on the NAS