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FAT32 vs NTFS




Hi everyone,

I've got a couple of external (firewire) hard drives that I want to use to take backups offsite, and I want the drives to be recognizable by a windows (2000 or xp) machine, so that if the place burns down or whatever, and my linux box is gone, I can easily pop the backup back into place on a windows machine. (Also that way if I'm working at home and discover I want a file, I can connect the drive to my laptop.) I don't need to deal with permissions or hard links or those kinds of things, because most of the files are backups originating from windows machines in the first place. So I figured I'd format the firewire drives with NTFS and mount them on my linux machine (and use rsync to bring them up to date).

But then I came across something saying that writing to NTFS volumes from linux is unreliable, but I wasn't sure if that was current info. Is it still true? Should I go with FAT32 instead, is that safer? I'd prefer NTFS, but only if I can count on it.

The linux computer I'd be using them with is a pentium 4 running Sarge with a 2.6.8-2-686-smp kernel.


-Andy



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