what is the most compatible external hard drive (for back up) for Linux?
 

Hi. Glad this is here. Question posed is recommendations for best brand that will be the most friendly with Linux.

Also, I cannot find a USB stick that doesn't end up locking files and labelling them all as 'read only'. Any suggestions of remedy and/or brand would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Mike

Any cheap Walmart external mini 1tb drives work for me like Toshiba, Sea Gate, whatever is on the shelf.
No need to overthink it at all. Just plug in and use it.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post5468877

On the usb stick. Is there a physical security lock switch on it?

http://www.pandawillforum.com/attach...542005&thumb=1

That is to protact your files on the usb stick as read only. If you move the switch. This turns that feature on or off.

i tend to disagree.
esp. for backup, i would format it to ext4 (or whichever filesystem your distro is using) first.

This was posted just a few days ago:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...er-4175562100/

So don't plug it in and use it. How it is formatted is up to the user so I let that be. That was not the question posed. Mine work as I see fit. I leave it to others to let theirs work as they see fit.

So disagree away I guess. Usually the 1st step in buying a drive that your computer can see and then proceed to see if you can read and write to it. At least in my own private Idaho.

Formatting and testing permissions again comes way later.
So not even sure what you are disagreeing with? KISS?

All I was saying was any wally world (since op is in the USA) would work.
Must be a language thingy I guess.

I agree that any drive should work -- the times when people have issues it tends to be to do with voltages and/or USB ports which aren't on the motherboard itself and not really a Linux issue. The issues with read-only are likely due to mount-point permissions and are nothing to do with the drive itself but down to Linux/Unix conventions. Buy one, format it to something other than FAT32 if your files will be larger than 4GB and use it -- if you have issues with read-only and the like it's a software problem and somebody will be a,long shortly to tell you how to fix it.

When USB sticks fail, they fail to read-only mode. They have limited writes. Some even have a switch on the side to make them read-only. I can get about six months out of most SDHC cards when used for live linux distros that mostly just watch youtube. Although some fail after only a few hours.

I don't disagree. However, having USB drives turn up as read-only is a pretty common occurrence on Linux as far as I can tell no matter how good the USB drive and what the desktop environment is. The answer, usually, is to work out a a to set the permissions on the mounted drive correctly -- I just chmod things on the mount point but I think the fstab solution is likely the correct one. Either way -- read-only USB storage (I've had it with mp3 players and, I seem to recall, my quadcopter) under Linux is very common as far as I can tell.

well, i've had more than one bad experience with ntfs filesystems on linux.
afaik, these backup programs (rsync...) need a filesystem that handles linux permissions and maybe other things properly - i.e., a linux filesystem... i could be wrong though.