Xubuntu and Windows 7 - potential hard drive formatting conflict?
 

Good evening,

I have about 200GB of data stored on a particular external hard drive. These files were copied to the drive using a Windows 7 laptop.

How can I avoid a formatting conflict if I copy files to this drive from a Xubuntu system? I have, in the past, backed up files from a Linux system to a drive which was formatted for use with Windows machines and had files stored which needed to be accessible from a Windows system, only to have the Windows computer in question be unable to read the contents of the drive.

Regards,

/L

Unless you reformat the drive within Linux, the existing formatting (presumably generated by the Win7 system) will remain in-tact. You can copy the files off at will without affecting the formatting of the drive.

In order to mount the drive you'll need the ntfs-3g packages installed though.

To clarify: my copying A LOT of data onto this drive from Linux will not affect its ability to be used in Windows?

Thanks,

/L

Why should it? All that matters to the OS is that it can read the file-system. Which OS has written which amount of data is not only irrelevant, but not determinable.
In short: Windows will not even notice that the data was written by a different OS.

All right; I had assumed that some sort of conflict might arise due to the differences in drive formatting/filesystem conventions between the two operating systems, but it looks like I am wrong. I will move forward with backing up my files, then. Thank you!

The OS difference is only a matter of filesystem preference. Linux prefers ext{2,3,4} filesystems, while Windows prefers NTFS filesystems. This only means that the OS will have the best support and performance with those filesystems though. When you attempt to use a different filesystem, such as NTFS or FAT32 on a Linux system, or FAT32 on a Windows system, it will still abide by those filesystem restrictions and leave the filesystem in-tact.

It's only if you allow the OS to reformat the drive to a different filesystem that problems will arise.