Hello all,

I have recently bought an external 4tb drive for backups and having an image of another 2tb drive (in case it fails). The drives are used for cold storage (backups). I would like a prefference on the filesystem i should format it. From the factory, it comes with ntfs and that is ok but i wonder if it will be better with something like ext4. Being readable directly from windows won’t be necessary (although useful) since i could just temporarily turn on ssh on the linux machine (or a local vm) and start copying.

Edit: the reason for this post is also to address an issue i had while backing up to an ntfs drive on linux. I had filesystem corruptions (thankfully fixed by chkdsk on a windows machine) and I would like to avoid that in the future.

Edit2: ok I have decided I will go with ext4. Now I am making the image of the first 2tb drive. Wish me luck!

  • @[email protected]English
    15•6 months ago

    If your Linux distro is using btrfs you can format it to btrfs and use btrfs send for backups. Otherwise the filesystem shouldn’t be to big if a deal unless you want to restore files from a Windows machine. If that is the case use ntfs

    • wallmenisOPEnglish
      2•6 months ago

      I use fedora 40 kinoite which uses btrfs but i am not sure i trust it enough for this data. Also forgot to mention in original post that I had some problems when overwriting files in ntfs which caused corruption. Thankfully chkdsk on a windows machine fixed that but I wouldn’t like for that to happen again when backing up from a linux machine.

      • @[email protected]
        2•6 months ago

        Are you sharing this drive with windows machines? It may be better to go exfat or something more neutral in that case.

        • wallmenisOPEnglish
          1•6 months ago

          Yeah but I’d rather have something with a journaling system that might make recovery easier. I don’t have any issue with temporarily connecting the drive to my pi and then moving the files via sftp (or spinning a vm via hyper-v/wsl). Also I don’t have much experience with CoW filesystems like zfs and btrfs and I am scared to mess with them in case I cause data loss by accident. So ext4 it is…