Ubuntu – backup drive: ext4 / FAT

backupext4fat32

if I'm backing up to an external drive, is there any reason to not use FAT other then FAT's file size/naming issues? It would be nice to be able to access the content on windows/mac but i'm not sure if there's any reason i have to use ext4 to backup with ubuntu files. This is really only for documents/photos/videos I have on the system.

Best Answer

Generally this can be done but there are some disadvantages:

  • there's a filesize limit (4GB)
  • you can't store any special file attributes like owner, permissions etc (this shouldn't be a problem for documents and videos though)
  • some sync tools like rsync don't work well when they can't check or set some of the files' attributes
  • old filesystems like FAT are more prone to fragmentation and file corruption

As an alternative you can install an ext3 driver on Mac/Windows or use NTFS (which doesn't suffer from problems number 1 and 4).

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