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.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 months ago

      Although it depends of the backup format :

      • If you store compressed tarballs they won’t be of any benefits.
      • If you copy whole directory as is, the filesystem-level compression and ability to deduplicate data (eg. with duperemove) are likely to save A LOT of storage (I’d bet on a 3 times reduction).