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!
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.