Dear Slackers,
I just bought a new 2 TB hard drive for backup of my data. It comes formatted as
mount reports
so I assume the file system on the drive is NTFS. So long as I know, NTFS is not a good file system to use under Linux, because Linux does not have the right tools to handle it (e.g. to repair it). What other filesystem would be suitable for formatting the hard drive, if I do not care about sharing data with Window$?

Thank you for your attention.
Best regards,
Martin

If you want to access your external hard drive from Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, make a FAT partition (type 0b) and format it as FAT using mkdosfs.

On the other hand, if you access it using Linux only, you may as well format it as ext2 or ext4. Make a Linux partition (type 83) and format it using mkfs.ext2 or mkfs.ext4.

Cheers,

Niki

exfat relieves (severe) size limitations the various FAT implementations suffer from.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello Martin,

I use external backup hdd with ext4 for years now.

Main benefit: you can preserve file attributes with rsync or cp.

Best regards

Larry

Personally, I am biased toward XFS because we use that a lot on servers (support for larger files and larger filesystems). But I am told that there are bad situations you could get into regarding the journal if the disk controller tries to take shortcuts and you lose power.

ext4 is also good. Both filesystems are journaled and they both support extended attributes.

But any "native" filesystem is going to be much better than NTFS if you only care about using the drive on Linux.

This.

IF you're only going to use it with linux, then go with any of the native filesystems, xfs, ext4, btrfs. If you need interoperability with Windows, then NTFS is the best filesystem as ntfs support in linux is quite mature and built into the kernel, unlike exfat which is a fuse driver only.

1 members found this post helpful.

This link may be helpful
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/filesystems.html

Personally, go with ext4 and move on. It's journaled, common, and I've yet to ever have a corruption issue with random powerouts (including on LUKS and LVM).

The kernel driver is pretty much read-only, ntfs-3g everybody is using is FUSE driver.

Thank you all for the helpfulness. I formatted it ext4.

Best regards,
Martin

NTFS in the kernel is read/write, but it's best to let fuse handle it via ntfs-3g for hotplugging.

Well, the kernel driver cannot change the size of files for instance (last time I checked), I'd call it mostly read-only.

there is a many problems, really.

for example, i have macbook, a linux machine ( desktop), and LG TV with usb, and built in mediaplayer.

i also have a several external HDD.

i finished with:

for my mobile, bring with me-general hdd i have two partition -ext4 and NTFS.

for HDD attached to TV i must use NTFS, as it ( LG 43LF540V, about year ago purchased, not smart tv) do not understand ext3/4/ exFAT

for Mac backups i use native HFS+

for mac - pc transfers i use ExFAT, as mac can read and write it, and slackware with fuse also can read and write it.

sadly, mac have problems with NTFS in Write mode, as so, if i want watch film from mac, i write from mac to exFAT hdd, then attach it and NTFS disk from TV to linux desktop, and copy over...

1 members found this post helpful.

Get a RPi running Kodi and hook it up to your TV.

Not to mention then using NFS / Samba to let Windows / Mac machines connect without worrying about filesystems.