Hi

I'm trying to decide which file system to use on my external usb drive.

I want to use it as a backup location for my "System" and "Home" using 'dar' and as a tool to pysically transport and share large files with friends who will most likely be using window$

My linux system will be on ext4 and it makes sense to backup on to a ext4, right? But I'm worried I won't be able to just plug it into a window$ system and 'drag and drop'. So maybe I should just keep it ntfs?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts

Use NTFS if you want to use it with Windows also. You will have no problem with backing up Linux to it, as long as you use tools like tar or make image-files (for example with dd or clonezilla) of your system.

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Thanks

'dar' shouldn't have any problems either right?

I don't know dar, never heard of it. If it uses a file based approach, like rsync or cp, then it will ahve problems with file permissions, since NTFS doesn't support Unix file permissions. If it uses any type of container-file for storing the backup (like tar or dd) it will work.

I don't know dar, but the factors will be the same as for any tool. If it backs up individual files, it's going to have the same problem as any tool: ext permission bits and owner values will be lost when writing to ntfs. But if it backs up into archive / image files (like tar or clonezilla), no such problems.

You can successfully copy any ext files to an ntfs drive. (With the default settings of the ntfs-3g driver you can even happily create files with ntfs-illegal characters in the names, like :, which then can't be read on Windows! But that's another story.) And you can restore any files that were backed up on a file-by-file basis. You just won't be able to restore a working linux system because of the file attributes.

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dar is a file archiver tool i.e. it creates a slice or container file and not does not just copy individual files.
No problems writing to a NTFS file system.

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Thanks All

I have been reading about permissions etc and now I "get it". The penny has dropped.

I'm going to forge ahead learning to use dar and back up onto my ntfs usb drive.

Take it easy