On Tuesday 13 January 2009, Adam wrote: > Chris Knadle wrote: > >> By "portability" I'm thinking of being able to plug it into some > >> other box (could be any OS) and reading files from it, so I > >> think a USB drive would be a lot easier to connect to an > >> unfamiliar machine. > > > > With a USB > > drive the client OS needs to support the filesystem on the USB > > drive directly. > > Okay, that answers one question. It looks like the filesystem for > the partition with the backups should be FAT32, since Linux, > Windows and (so I'm told) Macs can access it natively.
Uh, well, I think you're about to run into a problem there. The largest FAT32 partition that you can make before running into any compatibility issues with Windows is 32 GB. [With 'mkfs.vfat' you can create a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB, and Windows 2k or XP might be able to mount it, but 2k and XP cannot create a FAT32 filesystem larger than 32 GB.] From what I've read, Windows Vista apparently includes some new extension on FAT32 (essentially "FAT64"), but I don't know if prior versions of Windows can use that. So FAT32 itself seems to be a compatibility problem if you want to make one big 1 TB partition. NTFS is a little troublesome with Linux but works well with ntfs-3g, and you can get support on Windows for ext3 by installing a program. Either way you'll have at least one minor compatibility headache to deal with. > It also looks like 'tar' can handle both the archiving and the > compression, and there are programs to undo that for all those OSs, > which I will also put on that partition. Yeah, .tar and .tar.gz are rather ubiquitous. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jan 7 - Ruby on Rails Feb 4 - TBD
