Hello,

My move from windows, to Linux only, is near complete. Next step on my list is to backup all the data on my secondary hard drive, format the drive as FAT32, and place all the data back.

Here’s the question. Is there a way to check the data (in windows) after it's been transferred, for errors? I'm worried after I’ve moved all the data that I might lose something in the process. And because this is an NTFS file system I can't do any of this in Linux. Any suggestions on how best to proceed?

Thanks

I'm pretty new to linux, but I've attempted to do something similar, so maybe I can help.

I didn't try to change my file systems though, so maybe this won't apply. But I think the only way to accurately check if your data is intact is to copy that data to a separate drive or partition, and check the bytes between them.

I used a tool to do this, called datack (I can't really remember), but this program would check the exact files sizes between two directories...

The command was similar to "datack -size driveA/home | driveB/home" I wish I could provide a link, but I'm not finding anything relevant.

Well, I hope that helps you, and good luck.

md5sums checks data integrity.

In your case it'd be rather hard to check if you're missing something as you'd be destroying the original files. I'd suggest, best thing to do is backup your files twice, to DVD or tape, whatever, run md5sums on both to make sure their exact, if you get two backups that are identical, there's a higher possibility that your data is all there when you perform the restore.

It would be a little bit of work, but I use the backuppc software to backup systems of all types at work. The downside in the case of this backup is you need two computers to do it. Since it backsup over the network, there is no problem with reading the NTFS filesystem. You would simply share the contents of the drive under windows, and setup backuppc with the local workgroup/domain info. Then it uses the samba client to access the shared windows info. It will backup whatever you tell it, compress it (variable compression available), and it error checks it. Best of all, it is stored in a webinterface, so you can go in and download individual pieces or the entire thing.

Getting it setup isn't difficult, and over only a LAN it is easy to test out. The only problem some people have with it is that there is no GUI for the setup. You do have to go in and manually edit text files. Somebody may have written a GUI interface for setup, but I don't think so. Obviously once it is configured, you have the web interface to start or download any portion of the backup, it is just the setup of the backup that requires text editing.

Peace,
JimBass