Backup HD recommendations

[Kevin Buffardi]

I picked up a 120GB HD on a good deal that I plan on using solely as a
backup drive. I'll end up putting it in an enclosure as an External USB
drive. But that's beside the point, I was wondering how you suggested
formatting it? It'll be backing up data from both FAT32 and NTFS
drives, definitely some in the means of Ghost images, but probably some
direct file copying as well. I've considered reinstalling freeBSD on
one of the drives, but I'm not worried about backing that up at this point.

So what do you say? Partitioned/Single Partition? File system?
Block/Chunk sizes? etc?

These partitions will most likely change once I get the data backed up,
but right now the drives it'll be backing up are as follows:

120 GB ATA
(1) 40GB FAT32 (~17GB used)
(2) 80GB FAT32 (~40GB used)

40 GB ATA
(1) 40GB FAT32 w/ big chunks (~20GB used)

20 GB ATA
(1) 10GB NTFS (~7GB used)
(2) either unpartitioned or maybe FreeBSD?

Thanks.

//Kevin

 

[J. Clarke]

I picked up a 120GB HD on a good deal that I plan on using solely as a
backup drive. I'll end up putting it in an enclosure as an External USB
drive. But that's beside the point, I was wondering how you suggested
formatting it? It'll be backing up data from both FAT32 and NTFS
drives, definitely some in the means of Ghost images, but probably some
direct file copying as well. I've considered reinstalling freeBSD on
one of the drives, but I'm not worried about backing that up at this
point.

So what do you say? Partitioned/Single Partition? File system?
Block/Chunk sizes? etc?

These partitions will most likely change once I get the data backed up,
but right now the drives it'll be backing up are as follows:

120 GB ATA
(1) 40GB FAT32 (~17GB used)
(2) 80GB FAT32 (~40GB used)

40 GB ATA
(1) 40GB FAT32 w/ big chunks (~20GB used)

20 GB ATA
(1) 10GB NTFS (~7GB used)
(2) either unpartitioned or maybe FreeBSD?

If you are going to be backing up using software running on an installed OS
and not booting from your "backup" drive, then you need to use a file
system that can be written by all of the operating systems you plan to use.
If any Unix variant is involved, that pretty much lets out NTFS.

 

[U. Cortez]

Maybe partition it to match the file systems, if you're just copying
files from one partition to another. In other words, you'd have a
FAT32 partition on about 80 Gigs of the drive, then divide the rest
between NTFS or any other file systems you have.

Just an idea.

-U.

 

[Rod Speed]

You might as well just format it NFTS.

That would allow you to manually copy very large files
which may be bigger than FAT32 can handle, over 2/4GB