I have a couple of PNY SSD’s I plan to use for backups.
What format is best if I want to write Leap /home backups & windows files?
TIA
Bill_L
For Linux something like ext4 file systems.
For Windows something Windows.
Or I do not understand your question about the very general term “format”.
Thanks for your response. Sorry you feel the need to make it a ‘teaching’ lesson. AGAIN
As you will most probably write the backups from Leap (via cron job?), I would go with EXT4. You can access only from Leap (linux).
If you want to access the backup from Windows, NTFS or FAT is your choice (FAT takes no files larger than 4GB, not a limition for usual data on /home, but if you store large dd images or virtual machine image files this may bite).
We use Samsung T7 Shield external SSDs for backups of our various systems. Its default format is exFAT, but we always re-partition and re-format for the specific filesystem we’re backing up.
For example, all our various openSUSE systems are formatted as XFS for /home. We do not backup the separate root / filesystem (BTRFS), because if a catastrophic failure happens, it’s way easier to install the OS from scratch … and then we restore /home.
Okay, we also have a Windows 10 laptop - we only backup the “\Users*” sub-directory tree for the same reason described above. Simply re-install Windows, then restore “Users”.
So for the Samsung external SSD, it’s got a dedicated partition / filesystem that matches the Windows laptop filesystem … the other (SSD) partition is formatted as XFS for the Linux /home(s).
We use rsync to backup the Linux /home partitions … on the Win10 side, we use the robocopy command, which is similar to rsync.
@suse_rasputin @myswtest Thanks for your responses.
I use ‘luckybackup’ with Leap because it has rsync capabilities(which I do not, tried learning but couldn’t make it work).
I thought I wanted a formatted drive to write leap backups and miscellaneous files readable/writeable from either system(leap & windows).
Ya’ll have given me more to think about.
The PNY SSD’s are the credit card size & will be connected using USB cables that have a ‘sata’ type connection to the drive(s),
It looks like partitions for both systems is the best way to proceed.
Again, thanks for your insights.