FAT32 or NTFS for backup?

[Joe Starin]

Fast question: Have a Dell 8600 laptop with an NTFS file system. Want to
back up the laptop to a Western Digital external hard drive that I believe
is formated FAT32. Can I do this? I've heard that if you want to back up
data from one hard drive to another, the formatting of both drives must be
the same. Is this true? Thanks. Joe

 

[JS]

If you are just using the external drive for file backups then as
Big_Al mentioned there is a file size limitation with FAT32.

However if you are looking for a comprehensive backup
solution that protects you even if you should have a
hard disk failure then consider creating an Image Backup
of your laptop's drive to the external hard drive.

Norton Ghost - has a 30 day trial available
(Trial does not allow you to create a Bootable Restore CD AFAK)
http://www.symantec.com/norton/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost14
Product Review "Symantec's 14th Ghost":
http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/Norton-Ghost--Review-78775.shtml

True Image - has a 15 day trial version available,
(Trial version can create a Restore CD, but I have not verified this yet)
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

JS
http://www.pagestart.com

 

[Joe Starin]

Thanks for both replies. Yes, I want to create an image backup of my
laptop's hard drive to the external drive. (Had a hard BSOD crash the other
day, Windows shut itself down. Then the PC checked the file system twice,
deleted a corrupt attribute record, found some unreadable segments, even
found that "the volume is dirty.") Was able to do a System Restore, but only
in Safe mode.

Everything seems stable now, but this was a wake-up call to do regular
backups. Thanks for the suggestions. I've heard good things about True
Image; not as many good things about Ghost since Norton took it over.

Big_Al, will I be able to effectively back up my hard hard drive, given the
4GB FAT32 limit? I can format the external hard drive as NTFS -- will only
lose one old backup of my other PC in the process. Or should I just forge
ahead?

Joe

 

[smlunatick]

Thanks for both replies. Yes, I want to create an image backup of my
laptop's hard drive to the external drive. (Had a hard BSOD crash the other
day, Windows shut itself down. Then the PC checked the file system twice,
deleted a corrupt attribute record, found some unreadable segments, even
found that "the volume is dirty.") Was able to do a System Restore, but only
in Safe mode.

Everything seems stable now, but this was a wake-up call to do regular
backups. Thanks for the suggestions. I've heard good things about True
Image; not as many good things about Ghost since Norton took it over.

Big_Al, will I be able to effectively back up my hard hard drive, given the
4GB FAT32 limit? I can format the external hard drive as NTFS -- will only
lose one old backup of my other PC in the process. Or should I just forge
ahead?

Joe

It really does not matter which format type you use. When you will do
an image backup copy, it will change the format to match the one used
on the "source" drive.

If you want to do a image file copy (backup to an image file stored on
a different drive) then you need to use NTFS.

 

[Jim]

Replies inline---

Thanks for both replies. Yes, I want to create an image backup of my
laptop's hard drive to the external drive. (Had a hard BSOD crash the
other day, Windows shut itself down. Then the PC checked the file system
twice, deleted a corrupt attribute record, found some unreadable segments,
even found that "the volume is dirty.") Was able to do a System Restore,
but only in Safe mode.

Everything seems stable now, but this was a wake-up call to do regular
backups. Thanks for the suggestions. I've heard good things about True
Image; not as many good things about Ghost since Norton took it over.

Big_Al, will I be able to effectively back up my hard hard drive, given
the 4GB FAT32 limit? I can format the external hard drive as NTFS -- will
only lose one old backup of my other PC in the process. Or should I just
forge ahead?

Joe

I don't know whether you can format your external hard drive as NTFS or not.
I only know that I did. Mine is a 250 GB USB drive.
If you clone your system drive to a USB drive, as this is a bit by bit copy,
the format of the target will be the same as the source.
I clone my data disk to a USB drive once per month. That time frame is
adequate for my needs, but it might not be adequate for yours.
By the way, it takes this rather slow system 2 hours at least for the
cloning operation.
Jim

 

[HeyBub]

Thanks for both replies. Yes, I want to create an image backup of my
laptop's hard drive to the external drive. (Had a hard BSOD crash the
other day, Windows shut itself down. Then the PC checked the file
system twice, deleted a corrupt attribute record, found some
unreadable segments, even found that "the volume is dirty.") Was able
to do a System Restore, but only in Safe mode.

Everything seems stable now, but this was a wake-up call to do regular
backups. Thanks for the suggestions. I've heard good things about True
Image; not as many good things about Ghost since Norton took it over.

Big_Al, will I be able to effectively back up my hard hard drive,
given the 4GB FAT32 limit? I can format the external hard drive as
NTFS -- will only lose one old backup of my other PC in the process.
Or should I just forge ahead?

While it shouldn't matter for an image backup, NTFS is superior to FAT32 in
that NTFS is self-correcting. That is, for many errors, NTFS can detect and
fix them on the fly. Similar errors would bring a FAT32 system to its knees.

 

[JS]

The image back file created on your external hard drive will be about 40%
smaller in size (file compression) then the amount of used space on the
drive or partition you are backing up. So for example if your C: partition
currently has 10GB used, then the image backup file will be about 6GB in
size on your external drive. If the external drive is formatted FAT32 the
image backup software is smart enough (knowing the 4GB file size limit when
using FAT32) to break the backup into multiple files, usually the first file
will be 4GB and the remaining part of the backup will be stored in the
second file. When or if you need to restore the image backup the software
knows its stored in two files and will have no problem restoring you PC back
to the date and time you created the last image backup or an earlier backup
if you create (like I do) backups on a frequent basis and save each backup
to it's own folder.

If you reformat the external drive to NTFS then the entire 6GB backup will
end up as a single file.

So in my case I use Ghost (Version 10) and create folder names like: Ghost
091508, Ghost 081408, Ghost 072008, Etc. This is a quick way to identify the
backup creation dates.

Hope that answers your question, sorry I was late in responding but I was
using my test pc to evaluate Norton's NIS 2009 and used one of my earlier
image backup's that restored my test PC back to XP SP2 before I installed
NIS. Got a little side tracked.

JS
http://www.pagestart.com

 

[Twayne]

Fast question: Have a Dell 8600 laptop with an NTFS file system. Want

to back up the laptop to a Western Digital external hard drive that I
believe is formated FAT32. Can I do this? I've heard that if you want
to back up data from one hard drive to another, the formatting of
both drives must be the same. Is this true? Thanks. Joe

There really is no reason to stay with FAT-32 when you have NTFS
capability; it's also easy to switch a FAT drive to NTFS.
The drive came formatted FAT-32 for compatability with the most
operatins systems. If they used NTFS then only XP and like OS's could
use it out of the box.
NTFS does not have the 4 Gig/file limitation and does have several
other advantages not available with FAT. If you'd like to know more,
look for NTFS at wikipedia (best layman's descriptions & includes FAT)
or do some Google searches. YOu're almost certain to pass the 4 Gig
file size with backups so that alone is enough to go NTFS.
The main advantages of imaging progralm like Norton's Ghost or
Acronis TI are they can compress data, and will use the Shadow Copy
service, allowing operating system backups, easy scheduling, backup
types, etc..
ntbackup in XP is just as funtional and reliable but not as quick to
pick up on, and can be scheduled with Task Scheduler if money is tight.
Problem there is, it'll only save to a disk drive and no compression. So
you have to create the backup and then copy it to external storage or
wherever; won't write to CD, etc, without jumping thru some hoops.

For those little "critical" files I might edit several times a day, I
use XXCopy.exe from XXCopy.com. It's sort of a super Xcopy with lots
more switches & features. It's fast & reliable too & perfect for
non-operating sysem backups where the folders & file names don't change
a lot.
Not quite as quick to start up, but fully functional and like
XXCopy.exe is the latest version of WinZip. It has the ability to
create "jobs" for backups. IMO XXCopy is better but you have the
learning curve to go thru you won't have with WinZip.

HTH

Twayne

 

[Joe Starin]

Thanks for all the great discussion and info. I'm going to purchase one of
the discussed backup programs and use it to back up my two NTFS laptops, one
older "not sure" laptop, and one FAT32 desktop (which has already been
backed up to the FAT 32 Western Digital external drive.) I'd rather not do
any reformatting, especially if the backup program will make any necessary
"adjustments" for me. Joe