After repeated trouble with my NTFS formatted backup/media hard drive (undeletable files, etc.), I decided to reformat it with a unix file system (ext4 preferred).
I do not intend to use it from a Windows machine, but it should be accessible from other Linux systems (e.g. live cd, after system reinstallation or change of computer).
Could I run into trouble because of user/group permissions?
Is there a way to minimize these (e.g. by chosing a more appropriate file system than ext4 or parameters in /etc/fstab)? Recursive chowns do not seem very elegant or efficient to me.
Best Answer
Whether you may encounter permission problems with external media depends on whether all your machines share the same password and group database (the username-UID and group-GID mappings). Ownership on an ext4 filesystem is stored as UID and GID numbers.
A more appropriate but somewhat experimental filesystem you could try is UDF. It has the benefit of being theoretically cross-platform. You can
mounta UDF filesystem withuid=…andgid=…options, which may help you if you don't have a unified user database among your machines.