Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives? 484
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."
The solution.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Informative)
Thats exactly what I did. Threw a couple of external drives on a Mac Mini. Formatted as HFS+ and did software array. Then using afp and smb provided the contents as shares to the Windows media center and various client machines on the network.
Sure, software raid over USB is slow, but the bottleneck is the network so it doesn't really matter.
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100mbit link provides approximately 10MB/s. It's the difference between megabits and megabytes. I get about twice that on my USB drive. With gigabit, I can get around 50MB/s, and then the USB drive becomes the bottleneck.
Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or get a cheap NAS like the D-Link DNS-321. While certainly far from the bee's knees in terms of performance or number of bays (2), it can be had for under $100 and has been hacked to death to run all sorts of other stuff on it. Plus it's nice and quiet and doesn't use much power. And it's kinda purdy.
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I second this (DNS-323 myself). Runs like a champ, very low-power, files
available to every machine (and a WD TV Live) from any room in the house.
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Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Insightful)
+1 to this answer.
This is what SAMBA is for. My home network has a mix of Ubuntu, Mac OS and Windows. It just serves to all of them without problems.
I'm using a small silent PC as the server. Plug the USB drive into it, plug the USB turntable into it (and the cassette deck into the turntable) for ripping LPs and tapes, it's lovely.
SMB over wifi serves fast enough to play MPEG4 video on the laptop and keep the toddler amused.
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Or... you could just format it ext4 (or some other rediculous, Oracle style, check 600x times if the file's been copied correctly file system) and login to Linux once a month, take you Linux files and put it on there and then from within Linux put your Windows NTFS partition on read only and copy you Windows files from withing Linux to your secure ext4 backup drive.
Done...
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Dictionaries consider "irregardless" as incorrect. Then again, dictionaries follow language, they neither create nor limit it.
Nonetheless, it seems most people use "irregardless" in a satirical sense; using it explicitly because it is considered incorrect.
Most likely you should interpet "irregardless" in a satirical way; i.e. "not really regardless".
Again; the word isn't defined by any source generally considered authoritive any other way than "incorrect", so the writer may have intended to make the word me
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No, most people use it because they think they sound smart when they use a big word. The problem is, it's not a word and thus they just sound like an idiot to the very people they are trying to impress when they say or write irregardless.
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Funny)
No, most people use it because they think they sound smart when they use a big word. The problem is, it's not a word and thus they just sound like an idiot to the very people they are trying to impress when they say or write irregardless.
As a former coworker once told me, "Never use a large word when a diminutive one will suffice." I think he was showing off.
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Or to put it another way, dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive. If the word "irregardless" is used enough, it becomes a part of the language, and to be honest, I've heard it (and even slipped up and used myself) enough times that, whether or not it is currently considered a proper word, it's probably well on its way to being one.
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Funny)
Irregardless works in the dark.
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It might if irregardless was actually a word.
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It means "without lack of regard".. GOD!
Baltimore Orioles number one!
[OT] Words (Score:2)
It might if irregardless was actually a word.
Normalcy didn't exist until the 1850s, even though normality was 150 years older. (I'd never heard of normalcy until U.S. History class...)
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Insightful)
ummmm. okay. "Fugnutish". Let's keep it going a few more replies and I gots my new word :)
Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Funny)
Irregardless, you're new word is stupid.
Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can't just create words out of the blue. People will never be able to grok your meaning if you do. You know I'm right, so don't be all fugnutish about it.
Don't be such an asshat. [newsvine.com]
Re:The solution.. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really? I thought it was nonsense cause by proliferation of The Far Side cartoons.
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Irregardless is nonsense caused by confusion between the words irrespective and regardless.
At least people generally follow the intended meaning. Compare that to flammable, which came into use because people misunderstand "inflammable".
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Funny)
Utter rubbish. Irregardless is a perfectly cromulent word.
Exactly. It embiggens the language.
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Informative)
WRONG!
Irregardless [reference.com] is not a proper English word. Its usage has *ALWAYS* irked me from when I was a small boy to now. To use common vernacular, it's a mashup of 'irrespective' (one negative; prefix) and regardless (also, one negative; suffix). 'Irregardless' is a double negative and is thusly illogical by construction and would only be understandable to people born in the U.S. since 1970, and those less literate in the U.S. prior to that.
On my words that aren't words list it's right up there with 'impactful'.
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WRONG!
Irregardless [reference.com] is not a proper English word.
It sure looks like a word [reference.com] to me.
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Ok, do I really want to get into a philological discussion on a computer website? NO! Will I ask you to explore how words become part of an official language, and that even bad ones, or improper ones (like those with double negatives) make it into vernacular, dialect, and then possibly the root language? YES! Would I also remind you to look at the 'Usage' and 'Origin' sections of any definition? YES!!!!
Anyone can make up any word, have it spread through a local or regional vernacular, then get it picked
Re:The solution.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Irregardlessly, it is funny.
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Yes it is. [reference.com]
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Please take note, nobody actually cares!
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Irregardless of that website, "irregardless" most certainly is a word.
And you would be wrong.
Even disregarding the fact that it's not a word, the simple fact that the "ir" prefix negates the "regardless" should indicate to you that the word you think you're using isn't really a word at all. But then again, that's expecting intelligence and critical thinking from someone using "irregardless" in the first place, so I suppose that is kind of stupid in and of itself.
Don't bother (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Don't bother (Score:4, Informative)
NTFS (Score:4, Insightful)
I use NTFS on both my machines (Win/OS X/Linux) without any problems.
NTFS-3G is also available for Linux.
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Exactly my answer as well. NTFS-3G works find. Never had a problem with it under Linux nor under Mac OS X. It overcomes the limitations. I only wish it weren't a Windows file system. There needs to be a "universal file system" that is supported by all OSes without added software or hassle or patent/license problems.
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UDF fits that bill, doesn't it?
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I second this choice.
For some zealots it's hard to admit but the performance is really good, you have commercial backing of the biggest software company on the planet.
Recently a commercial company (Tuxera) was formed to provide commercial support for NTFS-3G and provide paid-for version of the driver for MacOS and Linux in addition to the free NTFS-3G.
So the future and cross platform access is looking really good.
On the other hand, if I were just a little bit more adventurous, I would much rather use Sun ZF
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I second this choice.
For some zealots it's hard to admit but the performance is really good, you have commercial backing of the biggest software company on the planet.
You only have commercial backing if the OS you're running it on starts with Windows and doesn't include Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, Haiku, Amiga OS, etc... in the name.
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As much as I love ZFS, one thing it's not good at is for a single removable disk. The inability for Apple to get this working without kernel panicking the machine was one of the many reasons they chose to drop it.
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Recently? They have write caching and such on NTFS-3G now.. trickled down from their commercial Tuxera project.
Fat32 and VLC (Score:3, Informative)
The best is... (Score:5, Funny)
...ReiserFS. I hear it's killer.
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Problem with ReiserFS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The best is... (Score:4, Funny)
I wouldn't.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wouldn't.... (Score:4, Informative)
I used to use freeNAS, but after a while I just wanted more than what it was offering.
I switched it for a windows home server (server 2003 SBE based), mainly for the backup features, and what with the freeNAS machine being the only non-windows machine left in my house it didn't matter that it lacks full compatibility with unix.
But yes, freeNAS is damn good at what it does, have set up some nice diskless server systems with freeNAS running from a USB stick and having all the client machines on the network sharing their drives with iSCSI, freeNAS would collect them all, turn them into a big redundant storage array, and share them back to the network, works well :)
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ZFS, supported equally on your OSes (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:ZFS, supported equally on your OSes (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, if you create a ZFS tank on a Solaris box and then move the tank physically to a FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE machine, it won't even see that there's a tank out there. Apparently GPT table layout is different on FreeBSD or something.
Won't stop you from serving ZFS over NFS/Samba/whatever, but you can't move the tank itself around. I know, I tried. Booted FreeBSD on a machine with a Solaris-issue ZFS tank, and it was like it wasn't there. It saw the drives fine, just not the tank.
Re:ZFS, supported equally on your OSes (Score:4, Informative)
I should mention that the tank on disk was ZFS v4, so it was not a case of the Solaris tank being of a rev level higher than what FreeBSD could handle.
Re:ZFS, supported equally on your OSes (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you "zpool export tank" before you moved the drives over? If not, then the FreeBSD box saw the drives but said to itself "Those drive don't belong to me!" I've done a migration from FreeBSD to Solaris, but always with full drive devices ie /dev/ad0 - thus ignoring partitions tables and other such cruddyness.
My setup is similar (Score:2)
I backup to portable USB hard disks. My backup machine is my eeepc 701. It runs ubuntu. I use this machine because it has fast USB and wifi interfaces. I have written a short shell script which runs on the eeepc. It uses rsync through ssh to copy user data from all the machines in the house to the external disk. I ignore the single windows machine in the house. If its user wants it backed up they can store their files on the server.
I initially tried backing up through a workstation runing netbsd but I found
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Oh and to answer the question I use ext2 on the external disks. I don't see a need for journalling on a backup device.
NTFS is becoming the lingua franca (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, if FAT32 won't do what you need, NTFS is pretty much where you'll need to go. NTFS-3g [tuxera.com] 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.
Words of caution (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [ext2fsd.com]
(Note that these experiences are under Windows XP, I have no clue if Vista or 7 does any better, I assume not.)
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Re:Words of caution (Score:4, Informative)
Turn off write caching for the drive and this problem goes away. It's supposed to be off by default (at least on removable drives, but some IDE/SATA-to-USB bridges show up as normal fixed drives rather than removable for whatever reason), but I've found it seems to turn itself on for whatever stupid reason.
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Avoid USB attached storage. (Re:Words of caution) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
network it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I have been using freenas on old boxes aggregating old disks ( I always want to get every last hour of use out of hardware before throwing it away) for a few years now and I find that the windows clients (98/2000/XP/Vista) work really well, much better than ubuntu samba. Thus i use nfs sharing for linux and smb for windows from the same freenas.
I am rather crap at setting up samba and the freenas makes it all nice and simple for numpties like me.
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And Windows clients frequently have compatibility issues with Samba servers all the time, especially when Microsoft releases updates to the client software. Esp. when it comes to things like domain membership, and file permission.
Certainly not in my experience. Our main fileserver is RHEL 5.4 and we have approx 100 people over 19 locations connecting to it daily. It gets its data from our SAN. At 3 locations we have Fedora 8 systems serving up Samba shares (large local files that aren't good candidates for the WAN). The boxes are set to use domain credentials (Windows 2000 DC's) and everything passes through as you'd expect -- no prompting for credentials and new users' home folders are setup automatically the first time they connec
FAT32 (Score:2)
You want something that will be read by your Linux, Windows and OS X machines? um, only one option I can see and thats FAT32. Any of their own systems, such as NTFS, get you only browsable directories by one or two of the other boxes.
I have a few suggestions (Score:2, Interesting)
If proprietary filesystems are on the table, how about VxFS [wikipedia.org] ?
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 s
What about a backup server? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 WD TV thing (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
IBM's HPFS (Score:2)
IIRC, NTFS is a descendent of something called HPFS, which is what IBM developed for OS/2. At least as recently as Win2K, Windows would mount and use HPFS partitons, and also I recall that Linux could read/write that as well. Look into that.
Check Tuxera NTFS (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [tuxera.com]
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/ [tuxera.com]
If you need high-performance for a commercial Linux application or device, you may want to check this:
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Bzzt... NTFS can't handle filenames that ext3, XFS and other Linux-based filesystems can handle. I went through this dance with my Drobo (incidentally, do not EVER buy a Drobo, not if you care about your data; it's dangerous to store data on that device)
ext3 and the Windows-side e2fs-explorer style packages are fine, or use Samba/CIFS and serve it up that way. I use rsnapshot on Linux to back up my Linux and Windows machines to my NAS, which is ext3-formatted.
NTFS is fine, if you're only ever backing up
Openfiler anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
HFS (Score:2)
Looks to me like HFS is the way to go since there are good solutions for all three platforms for HFS.
NTFS-3G works fine (Score:3, Insightful)
ext3 (Score:3, Interesting)
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
turn your usb drive into a NAS (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't tried it but it looks like a good idea. http://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=36218&sk=MC71419 [cyberguys.com]
Format it ext3 and then share it SMB for any OS.
Why all those ext3 recommendations? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Please read this (Score:5, Informative)
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
Oblig: XFS plug - it was made for media streaming (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Hybrid? FAT32 and [your-choice-of-fs-here] (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [sourceforge.net]
rfstool for ReiserFS - http://freshmeat.net/projects/rfstool/ [freshmeat.net]
ltools for EXT2/EXT2/ReiserFS - http://www2.hs-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/software/ltools.html/ [hs-esslingen.de]
and so on and so forth (a simple google for "[FS] Windows Compatibility" usually works.)
Just my thoughts. :-)
nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
NAS is the way to go (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ext3 (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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I haven't researched it, but I'd be willing to bet that the additions added to NTFS since Windows XP (volume shadow copies among other things) may not be supported by the Linux drivers. Not a huge problem, but something to keep in mind.
Re:Ext3 (Score:5, Informative)
Which particular driver are you referring to? There are a few.
Personally, I use Ext2 IFS [fs-driver.org] 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.)
Re:Ext3 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Tape is the best way of doing offline backups, but it has three disadvantages these days:
1: Tape drives that can store decent capacities are expensive. Expect to shell out $3-4 grand for a drive, and lots more for an autochanger.
2: Tape drives require a large I/O path all the time. There is a reason why no tape drives made recently use USB -- they require a SAS or at the low end Ultra 160 on a dedicated card. If the box can't dish out up to the 100 mbps that the tape drive wants, the tape starts shoe-s
Re:NTFS and Compress (Score:4, Insightful)
I would recommend NTFS.
That is the best solution to read from, but he says that he's going to primarily be using this from Linux - so NTFS might still be a bit risky.
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.
A couple of points here. First, why would he specify a file size unless he was going to put the movies on CDs? He'd be far better off simply using a constant-quality encoder, which would have the additional benefit of not requiring a second or third pass for optimal quality. Second, why recompress in this day and age? A 1TB drive can hold over 100 double-layer DVD movies... and if he has more DVDs than that, then the cost of a bigger/additional drive is minor compared to the cost of the collection...
mp3 files are like .jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each time they are copied
This is simply not true. Neither mp3s nor jpegs lose quality or data when copied. They only lose quality when they are re-encoded - just as you are proposing he do with his DVDs. DVDs are heavily compressed using MPEG2. Converting to MPEG4 or H264 is exactly the same as taking an MP3 and converting it to AAC or OGG - there will be quality loss no matter how well the encode is done.
Failure on large files? (Score:3, Interesting)
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).