Green Hard Drive

[Old-Polack]

I'll look again at some the new Seagate drives, but one year warranties are off putting.  HD manufacturers are also guilty of producing the same model drive with more than one platter/head configuration which are not easily distinguished.

All my more recent drives have a two year warranty. My older ones had a five year warranty. The two year warranty came about after the Taiwanese flood, started by WD, and the other manufacturers followed suit. Some Seagate drives still have the five year warranty. One has to check before ordering.

[Tony]

I've a question, hope I'm not breaking your trains of thought.

Say I have a 500 GB External Hard Drive, and I want to backup both Linux (ext4) Data, and also Windows Data, which would be NTFS, would it be critical to make two partitions, 1.) for Linux;  and a 2nd, as NTFS for the Win Data ? This is a scenario where I'd regularly be backing both filetypes.

My gut tells me to just use a single drive for a single filetype, at this point in time.
I've a feeling I stuffed up my Maxtor drive by not taking file systems into account.

If I was using a USB flash drive I know I can, or I have,...  just used Fat32 for both NTFS, and Ext4.

Any thoughts ?.

[Old-Polack]

I've a question, hope I'm not breaking your trains of thought.

Say I have a 500 GB External Hard Drive, and I want to backup both Linux (ext4) Data, and also Windows Data, which would be NTFS, would it be critical to make two partitions, 1.) for Linux;  and a 2nd, as NTFS for the Win Data ? This is a scenario where I'd regularly be backing both filetypes.

My gut tells me to just use a single drive for a single filetype, at this point in time.
I've a feeling I stuffed up my Maxtor drive by not taking file systems into account.

If I was using a USB flash drive I know I can, or I have,...  just used Fat32 for both NTFS, and Ext4.

Any thoughts ?.

If the data from the Linux installation doesn't need to have its ownership and permissions saved, it can be saved to a NTFS partition, as can the Window data. NTFS offers saving of larger files than Fat32 can support. If the Linux data needs the permissions and ownership preserved, it must be backed up to a Linux native filesystem, so would need a separate partition.

[Tony]

Thankyou O-P, I'll make a note of that ! The logic is quite obvious once the dynamics are explained. I came back a bit embarassed to delete the question as I felt the answer was probably here on the Forum, ...if I'd done a simple search. 

[pags]

I've a question, hope I'm not breaking your trains of thought.

Say I have a 500 GB External Hard Drive, and I want to backup both Linux (ext4) Data, and also Windows Data, which would be NTFS, would it be critical to make two partitions, 1.) for Linux;  and a 2nd, as NTFS for the Win Data ? This is a scenario where I'd regularly be backing both filetypes.

My gut tells me to just use a single drive for a single filetype, at this point in time.
I've a feeling I stuffed up my Maxtor drive by not taking file systems into account.

If I was using a USB flash drive I know I can, or I have,...  just used Fat32 for both NTFS, and Ext4.

Any thoughts ?.

If the data from the Linux installation doesn't need to have its ownership and permissions saved, it can be saved to a NTFS partition, as can the Window data. NTFS offers saving of larger files than Fat32 can support. If the Linux data needs the permissions and ownership preserved, it must be backed up to a Linux native filesystem, so would need a separate partition.

Alternatively, Linux data can be backed onto a FS that doesn't support Linux permissions (such as NTFS) if a "container" file is used (tar, truecrypt, etc.).  The file within the container file will maintain proper permissions, while the container file itself will be limited to the host FS (the downside to this approach is the lack of "simple" file access...you would need to un-tar, or mount the image file, etc.)

[Tony]

OK, thanks pags. An Archive File. Great for smaller bits of Data probably. Cheers 

[pags]

The other use would be if you see the mix of data changing in the future (i.e., you're transitioning from Windows to Linux, so expect as time goes on to have less and less data from Windows, and more and more data from Linux).  This would allow the mix of data to change, without requiring re-partitioning to accommodate it.

Just another thought to consider.

Personally, I don't run Windows as any primary platforms have one XP system handling my DVR, but it gets the recordings rsync'd to my Linux box.  Any other Windows backups (that I might do for friends and relatives as part of a cleanup) are done from Live CDs onto ext3/4 systems, anyway.  I figure that, as single-user data, the NTFS permissions will be sufficient when it's copied back onto an NTFS partition (which can also be achieved via SAMBA, SFTP, etc.)

[longtom]

I use file servers which are formatted as ext4 and are all but one accessed by Windows machines of different denominations without problems.  I use samba and samba users to sort out permissions and passwords - works very reliable. 
Certainly a lot saver and, in the end, easier than trying to achieve the same level of reliability and security the other way around.
Oh - and the backup is a lot easier as well that way ....

[horusfalcon]

Before commenting, let me note that my experience with larger (> 1 TB) drives is rather limited.

I note folks are saying that saving data from a Linux partition to an NTFS partition is do-able, and that's true, given the caveats about permissions and such that have already been expressed.

If it is necessary to preserve the operating system for some reason, it might be better to consider a solution such as Redo Backup or Clonezilla which can create either whole-disk or partition images that can be recovered to fresh media and be ready to go.  The only drawback here is that enough space is needed to store the images created, so yet another large drive needed for this purpose.

Just a thought...

Later On,
D