Hello all,
I have recently bought an external 4tb drive for backups and having an image of another 2tb drive (in case it fails). The drives are used for cold storage (backups). I would like a prefference on the filesystem i should format it. From the factory, it comes with ntfs and that is ok but i wonder if it will be better with something like ext4. Being readable directly from windows won’t be necessary (although useful) since i could just temporarily turn on ssh on the linux machine (or a local vm) and start copying.
Edit: the reason for this post is also to address an issue i had while backing up to an ntfs drive on linux. I had filesystem corruptions (thankfully fixed by chkdsk on a windows machine) and I would like to avoid that in the future.
Edit2: ok I have decided I will go with ext4. Now I am making the image of the first 2tb drive. Wish me luck!
I’d use ext4 for that, personally. You might also consider using full-disk encryption (redhat example) if there’s going to be any data on there you wouldn’t want a burglar to have. Obviously it wouldn’t do much good if you don’t encrypt the other disk as well, but having a fresh one to try it out on makes things easier.