[Agreed on ext] Which filesystem on external harddrive?

nabla² · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2005 Posts: 280

Hi,

I have a new 320 GB external harddrive and would like to know what filesystem to use. AFAICS ext2 with dir_index fits my need best. Reasons (AFAIK):

stable
widely supported, even usable under MS Windows
no journal needed (?) because the drive will be a backup medium

Fat is no option, Reiser I dont like. Any other advice?
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wah · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 3:47 pm Post subject:

I agree with your choice - I use either ext2 or ext3 (with dir_index) for my external HDD's. I need windows compatibility AND the ability to move large (+2GB) files around between linux/windows.

Works great for me!

Cheers,
W.
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nabla² · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2005 Posts: 280

thx

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Gentoo on Intel Core Duo 2 E6750, Gigabyte P35-DS3P, NVIDIA 8800GTS (amd64)

s0be · Apprentice Joined: 23 Nov 2002 Posts: 240

I always create a small partition on the drive with the required windows software or utilities to access them.

http://www.freeotfe.org/docs/index.htm

is a great utility for these sorts of things. I use that for a drive we use at work for offsite backups. Allows me to access the backups from any of my home machines if I need using cryptoloop, but still easily written to from windows. I have a batch file written that reads the password from a file on the physical machine at work, then automatically mounts the share. Yes, I understand that having the password stored in a file is retarded, but to get to that file, you'd need physical machine access, which is a much bigger WTF. I just have a bash script on my laptop that prompts me for the password (much lower security in my house than at work).