Re: FAT32 vs NTFS
On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 11:41:09AM -0500, 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.
>
> 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
>
I wonder if you really want to have a drive that you can plug into a Windows
box. Wouldn't it be satisfactory to state your goal as plug into an Intel x86
box? If this is OK statement of what you really need/want, then install a
version of Debian in the hard drive so that the drive is self booting, and
use ext3 for all the files, or partition the drive so that there is a FAT32
partition for Windoze stuff and an ext3 for Linux stuff (in addition to small
ext3 partition for booting)
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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