What filesystem would be best for backups? I'm interested primary in stability (especially uncorruptability of files during hard reboots etc.) but how efficiently it handles large (>5GB) files is also important.
Also, which mount parameters should I use?
Kernel is Linux >= 2.6.34.
EDIT: I do not want backup methods. I need the filesystem to store them.
Best Answer
You can use ext4 but I would recommend mounting with
journal_datamode which will turn off dealloc (delayed allocation) which 'caused some earlier problems. The disabling of dealloc will make new data writes slower, but make writes in the event of power failure less likely to have loss. I should also mention that you can disable dealloc without usingjournal_datawhich has some other benefits (or at least it did in ext3), such as slightly improved reads, and I believe better recovery.Extents will still help with fragmentation. Extents make delete's of large files much faster than ext3, a delete of any sized data (single file) should be near instantaneous on ext4 but can take a long time on ext3. (any extent based FS has this advantage)
ext4 also
fsck's faster than ext3.One last note, there were bugfixes in ext4 up to like 2.6.31? I would basically make sure you aren't running a kernel pre 2.6.32 which is an LTS kernel.