Dear All,
I gave just bought an external disk to be used on machines running Fedora. Which format would you recommend to format the disk? And what steps should I follow?
Thanks in advance,
Paul
On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 10:23 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
I gave just bought an external disk to be used on machines running Fedora. Which format would you recommend to format the disk? And what steps should I follow?
More information might help get better answers. Such as whether you're after fastest speed, or best reliability, having available tools to be able to rescue data, only ever intending to use the drive with Fedora, or maybe being compatible with other OSs...
I've just used ordinary ext3 with my drives, since it's simple to deal with, and I don't require them to be readable by Windows, at all.
You can use tools like gparted to give you a reasonably simple interface to prep the drive (partition, name, format), from the one program.
A bit of advice: Format the entire drive, and check it for errors. Better to spend the (annoying amount of) time to do this before you begin using the drive, than to use it for several months before you come across a seriously bad part of the drive, then have to deal with backups and trying to return a bad drive.
Another bit: Drives aren't as robust as people might think. The laptop size drives are meant to be portable, the desktop size drives are meant to be left alone. That not only means don't move them while they're running, but that carrying a stopped drive, and thumping it about, like any other ordinary object, doesn't do much good for its health.
On 09/22/2014 02:40 PM, Tim wrote:
On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 10:23 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
I gave just bought an external disk to be used on machines running Fedora. Which format would you recommend to format the disk? And what steps should I follow?
More information might help get better answers.
ACK. Much of a recommendation depends upon the use-case you want your external disk for.
E.g. as a Linux-only backup drive, I usually use ext4, to exchange data with Windows, there hardly is an alternative to ntfs, and to exchange data with arbitrary other systems (TVs, MediaPlayers) other restrictions may come into play.
Ralf
On Monday, September 22, 2014 02:51:15 PM Ralf Corsepius wrote:
E.g. as a Linux-only backup drive, I usually use ext4, to exchange data with Windows, there hardly is an alternative to ntfs, and to exchange data with arbitrary other systems (TVs, MediaPlayers) other restrictions may come into play.
I would not share same drive for backing up a Linux system on a ntfs drive because ntfs doesn't handle permissions the same way as ext4 does. Permission are not so much critical for music and videos but it surely messed up my dev environment when I tried restore my backup from ntfs drive.
On 09/22/14 22:11, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
On Monday, September 22, 2014 02:51:15 PM Ralf Corsepius wrote:
E.g. as a Linux-only backup drive, I usually use ext4, to exchange data with Windows, there hardly is an alternative to ntfs, and to exchange data with arbitrary other systems (TVs, MediaPlayers) other restrictions may come into play.
I would not share same drive for backing up a Linux system on a ntfs drive because ntfs doesn't handle permissions the same way as ext4 does. Permission are not so much critical for music and videos but it surely messed up my dev environment when I tried restore my backup from ntfs drive.
Does anyone actually just copy files from their system to a backup drive?
Maybe it is because I started using systems when disk storage was more expensive. But I've always either used tar or cpio compressed backups. This way, no matter where the info is stored or moved around things like selinux contexts and extended attributes will be retained.
On Monday, September 22, 2014 10:41:37 PM Ed Greshko wrote:
Does anyone actually just copy files from their system to a backup drive?
Maybe it is because I started using systems when disk storage was more expensive. But I've always either used tar or cpio compressed backups. This way, no matter where the info is stored or moved around things like selinux contexts and extended attributes will be retained.
I don't have an elaborate backup system. I just up grsync to do 1:1 copy of the data. The answer is yes.
On 22 Sep 2014 at 22:41, Ed Greshko wrote:
From: Ed Greshko ed.greshko@greshko.com Date sent: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 22:41:37 +0800 To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Subject: Re: Recommended format for external hard disk Send reply to: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org mailto:users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=unsubscribe mailto:users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=subscribe
On 09/22/14 22:11, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
On Monday, September 22, 2014 02:51:15 PM Ralf Corsepius wrote:
E.g. as a Linux-only backup drive, I usually use ext4, to exchange data with Windows, there hardly is an alternative to ntfs, and to exchange data with arbitrary other systems (TVs, MediaPlayers) other restrictions may come into play.
I would not share same drive for backing up a Linux system on a ntfs drive because ntfs doesn't handle permissions the same way as ext4 does. Permission are not so much critical for music and videos but it surely messed up my dev environment when I tried restore my backup from ntfs drive.
Does anyone actually just copy files from their system to a backup drive?
Maybe it is because I started using systems when disk storage was more expensive. But I've always either used tar or cpio compressed backups. This way, no matter where the info is stored or moved around things like selinux contexts and extended attributes will be retained.
Know about disk storage being expensive. My first computer had an option to add a 20M hard disk for $2,000. My computer came with dual 320K floppies.
On disk images, I do a disk imaging project, and recently have done some test using a USB 3.0 128GB flash. With windows partitions I use ntfsclone backup images, and can restore a 15GB image file to a 160GB ntfs partition in about 4 1/2 minutes. Takes about 8 minutes when using a USB 2.0 port. Have also down done image of Fedora systems using both NTFS and extx partitions on external disks. Bit level images with lzop compress are the fastest, but one needs to clear free space to greatly reduce size since it backs up all sectors.
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I do too. Mostly I use rsync and dcfldd
----- Original Message -----
On 22.09.2014, Ed Greshko wrote:
Does anyone actually just copy files from their system to a backup drive?
Yes, at least I do.
When data is compressed, a single bit flip can render te whole archive useless. So therefore I just copy the whole thing. It's easy, reliable and fast.
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On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 12:21:05PM -0400, ergodic wrote:
I do too. Mostly I use rsync and dcfldd
me too. Using rsnapshot backing up to a locally-attached esata raid-1 device.
----- Original Message -----
On 22.09.2014, Ed Greshko wrote:
Does anyone actually just copy files from their system to a backup drive?
Yes, at least I do.
When data is compressed, a single bit flip can render te whole archive useless. So therefore I just copy the whole thing. It's easy, reliable and fast.
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I prefer dcfldd for complete partitions because it does not change the partition UUID. You can also copy the partition to a file eg: foo.img
----- Original Message -----
On 22.09.2014, ergodic wrote:
Mostly I use rsync and dcfldd
In my case, it's all very simple. I'm using "rsync -avxHSAX --delete /source/ /target" after having done an integrity check.
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On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 07:41:20PM +0530, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
On Monday, September 22, 2014 02:51:15 PM Ralf Corsepius wrote:
E.g. as a Linux-only backup drive, I usually use ext4, to exchange data with Windows, there hardly is an alternative to ntfs, and to exchange data with arbitrary other systems (TVs, MediaPlayers) other restrictions may come into play.
I would not share same drive for backing up a Linux system on a ntfs drive because ntfs doesn't handle permissions the same way as ext4 does. Permission are not so much critical for music and videos but it surely messed up my dev environment when I tried restore my backup from ntfs drive.
but if you HAVE TO use a NTFS drive, do the backup as a tar file which is written to the NTFS drive. This should preserve ownership and permissions.
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 10:23 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
I gave just bought an external disk to be used on machines running Fedora. Which format would you recommend to format the disk? And what steps should I follow?
More information might help get better answers. Such as whether you're after fastest speed, or best reliability, having available tools to be able to rescue data, only ever intending to use the drive with Fedora, or maybe being compatible with other OSs...
I've just used ordinary ext3 with my drives, since it's simple to deal with, and I don't require them to be readable by Windows, at all.
You can use tools like gparted to give you a reasonably simple interface to prep the drive (partition, name, format), from the one program.
A bit of advice: Format the entire drive, and check it for errors. Better to spend the (annoying amount of) time to do this before you begin using the drive, than to use it for several months before you come across a seriously bad part of the drive, then have to deal with backups and trying to return a bad drive.
Another bit: Drives aren't as robust as people might think. The laptop size drives are meant to be portable, the desktop size drives are meant to be left alone. That not only means don't move them while they're running, but that carrying a stopped drive, and thumping it about, like any other ordinary object, doesn't do much good for its health.
Thanks to all for your replies.
The external disk is to backup the hard disk of my computer, which runs Fedora, So, according to your advice, I will format that with the ext4 format via GParted.
Paul
Definitely a journaling filesystem like ntfs, ext3 or ext4.
If windows should also have access to it you're gonna have to use ntfs, otherwise ext4 is the way to go.
Check it also for bad sectors w/ `badblocks`, better to be safe than sorry.
- Nathan
-
Ed Greshko -
ergodic -
Fred Smith -
Heinz Diehl -
Michael D. Setzer II -
Nathan Schwarz -
Paul Smith -
Ralf Corsepius -
Sudhir Khanger -
Tim