Sonntag, 23. November 2008

Filesystems for any OS...

I'm just thinking about filesystems on my next USB-Backup Disk.

Status

Currently i have backup disks formatted with FAT32 (for use with all OS), AFS (for OS X-Time Machine) and ext3 (for linux backups). My main backup disks formatted with FAT, because at this time "Mac OS X" did not support anything other.
I currently plan to by new disks, so it's time to think about this filesytem-mix (or filesystem-mess).


needed Features

Here are my features, i'm dreaming of:
  • journalling: my backup disk should be able to hold my data, even if the OS crashes the disk losses power.
  • filesize: it would be nice to be able to store at least 4.7GB ISO-DVD-Images (i sometime master the images on one PC, but burn on a differen one) and to store my full-length DVB-?-Movies (captured from TV) on the disk without splitting.
  • hardlinks: Do you know Apple's time machine? then you know why hardlinks are something fantastic. you can copy wih "rsync --links-desk=..." and have something like a versioned backup for your data. The best: you do incremental backups, but can delete old backups as if they are full backups.
i do need the backup with several Operating systems. If my Macbook is sunk in the toilette, i'd like to access my data via linux or windows. (Which is quite difficult, i i have only the time machine backup - who can read AFS with this apple partitioning??)


Possibilities

a bigger and maybe for you better ist is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

FAT32

  • OS-Support: excellent
  • biggest filesize: 4GB (bad)
  • journalling: no, but many tools can repair FAT.
  • hardlinks: no

NTFS

  • OS-Support: not sufficient:
    • win: excellent,
    • linux: good (ntfs-3g: read/write),
    • mac: native: read-only, ntfs-3g should works
  • biggest filesize: 16TBGB (but not shure, if anyone but win can read >4GB-Files)
  • journalling: yes (at least with win, not shure what ntfs-3g does here)
  • hardlinks: yes

ext3

  • OS-Support: good
    • win: http://www.fs-driver.org/ -> without journalling
    • linux: native
    • mac: not shure yet (wikipedia say's: "possible with ext2fsx" -> without journalling)
  • biggest filesize: 16GB (enough)
  • journalling: yes (not windows)
  • hardlinks: yes
Looking at the above mentioned list at wikipedia, i guess these are all i can choose.


Results

I don't like to use NTFS, because it is not open sources and with each new windows version, i'm not shure if features are added that break my linux/mac (write) support. The restore possibillities are either cost money or come from Microsoft. The tools from MS are okay, i guess, but i the need windows to repair. This is dangerous in an emergency! (Just try to find a Windows-Live-CD...)

FAT32 is ancient, though it lack eatures of modern files systems. I will use this filessystem on "transfer usb disks" because anyone can read/write this without problems.

ext2/3 i'm not shure about this. the Mac ext2fsx project has a beta from 11/2006, Leopard appeared 10/2007. The filesystem itself has all features i need. Read/write support for windows and Linux is good, but Mac.... .

Anyone knows a better alternative?



Links

The Blogosphere seems to prefere "ext2/3"

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