On 05 May 2023 08:29, Michel Verdier wrote:
Le 5 mai 2023 zithro a écrit :If on USB/external drive, preferably format the drive so it can be read on multiple OS. So prefer FAT32/exFAT, and avoid ext4, ZFS, NTFS, APFS, etc.As I don't need to restore debian on windows I choose to format my external drive with xfs on encrypted partition
I agree that for normal use cases, you can do whatever is easier and practical for you ! You could as well create a blank disk image file, mount it as a loop device, format as encrypted xfs (or better, encrypted zfs), unmount and finally copy (dd or zfs-send) the image file on whatever medium you want. (I don't know much about xfs, but zfs has advantages for this purpose: snapshots, encryption, variable block size, ACLs, zfs-send directly to a file, etc).
But, my point was that backups must be accessible at all times, covering the most use cases possible.
So it means up to the most critical emergency situations, when you don't have a system at hand that can read a particular filesystem, but you must read/extract the data from your backup.
Hence choosing the most universal FS.