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.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    zfs is made for data integrity. I wouldn’t use anything else for my backups. If a file is corrupted, it will tell you which file when it encounters a checksum error while reading the file.

      • refalo@programming.dev
        0·
        6 months ago

        if you’re also using raidz or mirroring in zfs, then yes. it can also do encryption and deduplication

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        If there is a redundant block then it will auto recover and just report what happened. Redundancy can be set up with multiple disks or by having a single disk write blocks to multiple places by setting the “copies” property to more than 1.