Re: FAT32 vs NTFS
At 10:53 AM 3/2/2005, Randy Orrison wrote:
Be aware that not all valid ext3 filenames are representable in NTFS or
FAT. In particular, Maildir style filenames contain a : and so get
renamed to something 8 characters long, losing any maildir status flags
(which are after the : in the filename) in the process. If ZIP files can
contain filenames with :s in them, you might try zipping while you're
doing the backup, both to save space and to preserve the filenames. There
are Windows programs that can handle tar files (WinZip) but I don't know
what it would do with filenames with :s.
Randy, your timing is perfect. I just opened up my debian-users mail
folder ... because I just discovered the exact problem you describe. The
files are backups from several servers, some windows and some
unix/linux. And there are colons all over the place in the linux file
names ... perl stuff, and so on. And I'm trying to use rsync to
synchronize stuff from the internal hard drives to the fat32 one, and it
just gets hosed by this.
Ugh.
Time to rewrite the plan, I guess. It looks like the options are:
1. Use ext3 on the firewire drive, and lose the ability to plug it into a
windows computer.
2. Stick with fat32 but abandon rsync and go with something involving tar.
3. Use two different firewire drives, one with fat32 for windows backups
and one with ext3 for linux backups.
I'm thinking #3 has a lot going for it. I had been planning on using two
drives to just rotate. So this would either mean giving up on that or
spending another few hundred bucks for two more drives.
Wrapping everything in tar seems like it would make the retrieval a real pain.
-Andy
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