Suggestions for filesystem.

Hello all,

I have recently bought an external 4tb drive for backups and having an image of another 2tb drive (in case it fails). The drives are used for cold storage (backups). I would like a prefference on the filesystem i should format it. From the factory, it comes with ntfs and that is ok but i wonder if it will be better with something like ext4. Being readable directly from windows won't be necessary (although useful) since i could just temporarily turn on ssh on the linux machine (or a local vm) and start copying.

Edit: the reason for this post is also to address an issue i had while backing up to an ntfs drive on linux. I had filesystem corruptions (thankfully fixed by chkdsk on a windows machine) and I would like to avoid that in the future.

Edit2: ok I have decided I will go with ext4. Now I am making the image of the first 2tb drive. Wish me luck!

WarmApplePieShrek ,

ext4 is the linux equivalent of ntfs

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ,

Buck the trend, put APFS on those bad boys.

wallmenis OP ,

Not bad idea.

LeFantome ,

Well, given the current state of the Open Source driver, I think it is a bad idea.

Although, I guess if you can tolerate closed source….

https://www.paragon-software.com/business/apfs-linux/

wallmenis OP ,

I was kidding...

downhomechunk ,
@downhomechunk@midwest.social avatar

Or, kick it old school with reiserFS

Samueru ,

Btrfs

Frederic ,

agree, and it compresses automatically, can be useful for some backup

wwwgem ,
@wwwgem@lemmy.ml avatar

There was just a similar post here. You may find interesting clues there as well.

friend_of_satan ,

zfs is made for data integrity. I wouldn't use anything else for my backups. If a file is corrupted, it will tell you which file when it encounters a checksum error while reading the file.

lemmyvore ,

Can it recover the error?

friend_of_satan ,

If there is a redundant block then it will auto recover and just report what happened. Redundancy can be set up with multiple disks or by having a single disk write blocks to multiple places by setting the "copies" property to more than 1.

refalo ,

if you're also using raidz or mirroring in zfs, then yes. it can also do encryption and deduplication

toothbrush ,
@toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I recommentd ext4. Its extremely stable and easy to manage. Btrfs, zfs etc. is overkill for a pure data drive imo.

Bogasse ,
@Bogasse@lemmy.ml avatar

Although it depends of the backup format :

  • If you store compressed tarballs they won't be of any benefits.
  • If you copy whole directory as is, the filesystem-level compression and ability to deduplicate data (eg. with duperemove) are likely to save A LOT of storage (I'd bet on a 3 times reduction).
mbirth ,

This! And I’d probably add par2 parity files - just in case some bitrot happens.

Laser ,

I can't tell if this is actual advice or irony

kbal ,
kbal avatar

I'd use ext4 for that, personally. You might also consider using full-disk encryption (redhat example) if there's going to be any data on there you wouldn't want a burglar to have. Obviously it wouldn't do much good if you don't encrypt the other disk as well, but having a fresh one to try it out on makes things easier.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

Depending on your skill level, you may want to consider a deduplicating file system, like BTRFS or ZFS. That way, you can make copies of the source drive and deduplicate unchanged segments, making every copy after the first only take up a small percentage of the apparant disk size.

I've personally used duperemove to deduplicate old disk images and it works very well in my experience.

I wouldn't use NTFS with Linux. The driver is stable enough that it doesn't corrupt the file system anymore these days, but performance isn't as good as alternatives.

tiny ,

If your Linux distro is using btrfs you can format it to btrfs and use btrfs send for backups. Otherwise the filesystem shouldn't be to big if a deal unless you want to restore files from a Windows machine. If that is the case use ntfs

wallmenis OP ,

I use fedora 40 kinoite which uses btrfs but i am not sure i trust it enough for this data. Also forgot to mention in original post that I had some problems when overwriting files in ntfs which caused corruption. Thankfully chkdsk on a windows machine fixed that but I wouldn't like for that to happen again when backing up from a linux machine.

atzanteol ,

NTFS has never been well supported on Linux. Any native filesystem will be fine.

terminhell ,

Are you sharing this drive with windows machines? It may be better to go exfat or something more neutral in that case.

wallmenis OP ,

Yeah but I'd rather have something with a journaling system that might make recovery easier. I don't have any issue with temporarily connecting the drive to my pi and then moving the files via sftp (or spinning a vm via hyper-v/wsl). Also I don't have much experience with CoW filesystems like zfs and btrfs and I am scared to mess with them in case I cause data loss by accident. So ext4 it is...

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