Re: HD Backup

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 22:06 -0600, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> But you can't put an SATA or SAS drive in an enclosure designed for PATA
> (or EIDE, God forbid!), can you?

You don't need an ATA to FireWire or USB converter.
SATA goes 1m, SATA goes 8m.

> All I know about UDF is what I read in the funny papers:
> http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_ipge.asp 

This entire thread started on Linux backup, with the desire for
something to be readable from Windows.  UDF does that, while preserving
the capability to store UNIX ACLs, special nodes and other details.

Using NTFS does _not_.

Furthermore, XP _does_ have limited UDF rewrite support, despite that
Microsoft KB article.  And some of us have 3rd party software that lets
us UDF rewrite with more capabilities than what XP has.

> This sure doesn't look much like my first choice for a filesystem on a
> hard drive.

On a local, fixed drive, no.

On a removable, cross-platform drive ... yes!

> As I read this and other citations, UDF was specifically developed
> specifically to overcome the size limitations built in to ISO9660 for
> purposes of supporting DVD-R/RW, and not as a general purpose
> filesystem. Nothing on the wikipedia page you cited leads me to
> believe otherwise.

You obviously didn't read the same page I did.

UDF _is_ a general purpose, 64-bit filesystem -- completely cross-
platform.  UDF was _designed_ as a re-writable filesystem from day 1.
That includes the ability to contain various Extended Attributes of
different OSes.

It is well beyond the limited, pre-mastering capability of ISO9660.
Just because it can be used as the successor of ISO9660 doesn't mean
it's has the same limitations.  That was _not_ UDF's first application,
it's first application was on large capacity optical formats -- which
were well in _excess_ of the hard drive capacities when it was created.

This was _years_ before recordable/rewritable DVD-R/RW became available.

> And nowhere is journaling support mentioned.

And what is journaling?
Do you even know what journaling does?
Journaling allows increased recovery time, but it does _not_ necessarily
guarantee better consistency.

In fact, because optical drives have _greater_ data error rates than
magnetic drives, UDF offers many data integrity improving features.
Please, you really don't know what your talking about now.

> Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stay with NTFS for hard drives.

For a fixed NT disk, sure.
But for backing up a Linux system, Ext2/3 or UDF.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
Some things (or athletes) money can't buy.
For everything else there's "ManningCard."



-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.