Re: FAT32 vs NTFS
On Wednesday 02 March 2005 11:41 am, Andy Rowan wrote:
> 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.
What about backing up the Linux files to a zip archive of some type? That way
the filenames will remain the same internally. It won't help when those same
files are extracted for Windows, but it might be easier to create a
work-around, and the Linux filenames will stay the same for Linux use.
Hal
> 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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