Chris Knadle wrote:
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.
Thanks for the pointer, Chris! I did some research online, and it looks
like FAT32 can handle partitions up to 4 TB. Windows can't /create/
partitions over 32 GB, but it can use them without problems. It just
means I'll have to use some third-party software to create it.
BTW I wasn't planning to make the entire drive one partition. My
current plan has six partitions, mostly ext3, plus some unallocated
space, and my tentative size for the one for the backups was 100 GB. If
it has to be 32 GB, I can see if that's enough, and create more 32G
partitions if I need them.
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.
I think bzip2 creates slightly smaller files than gzip, but I'll go with
gzip because it's better supported under various OSs.
Adam
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