Re: HD Backup

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

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 17:13 -0800, Tom Dison wrote:
> My humble $0.02. I've learned the hard way you do not
> want to use Fat32 on the primary drive for Win2K, XP.

And just so everyone knows, I _never_ argued against using NTFS for a
local, fixed disk.  I have been doing so since day 1.

Right now Microsoft has left a massive gap in the real need for a
filesystem for removables above 32GiB (33.8GB).  So far, they prevent
you from formatting NTFS on a lot of removables, but they don't enforce
it on externals that look like a fixed disk.

Microsoft has all but admitted that it handles geometry between NT
versions very inconsistently above 32GiB, hence why it doesn't let NT5.x
(2000/XP) format FAT32 filesystems greater than 32GiB.  It will use
larger FAT32 filesystems created by other systems though.

Now more than ever they realize they need the WinFS subsystem, and
wished they would have completed CairoFS long ago.  But that's another
story.

> SEveral of my developer tools would break, because
> there was a hidden assumption concerning file
> permissions (at the deep level of DCOOM, etc).

NTFS is very _tied_ to NT functionality.  On a business system, you
should _always_ use NTFS.  The only time I've seen some things break on
NTFS were early in the NT years when 99% of software was written for
"Chicago."

Today, it's the opposite, a lot of tools break on FAT32, but not NTFS.

> Also, I believe it to be a more efficient filesystem
> (I'm sure Bryan has details).

FAT was never a good filesystem design.  It does not have any reliable
consistency checking capability or enforcement.

NTFS, like its HPFS father (and predecessor to JFS, which is a whole
other book), is still a FAT design, but much, much better.  It's sad
that there were some really stupid design decisions made, but then
again, there were many of those in NT in general (like the GDI).

I'm biased towards inode filesystem designs, but it's not the holy grail
either.  But I find it has less issues than FAT designs, especially when
you get a critical error that severs a portion of the tree.  In an inode
filesystem, you still have that tree.  In a FAT filesystem, you've get
unorganized clusters.

> I guess if you are dual-booting, Fat32 lets you read-write the drive
> from Linux.  I would rather have an intermediate Fat32 partition for
> sharing between OS's, 'cause you still will have no problem reading
> NTFS from Linux (I just don't trust writing to it). In my case, I use
> the Ext IFS driver to read my Ext3 partitions from Windows, and I can
> read the NTFS from Linux.

The nice thing about the ext2ifs driver is that it's read-only.
That solves part of the Ext3 compatibility issue.

> I don't really see a need to write to either OS's main file system.

And I would _avoid_ doing so.  You should always _avoid_ touching the
OS' boot/system filesystems.

FAT32 and UDF are natively supported by both Windows XP and Linux 2.4+.


-- 
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.