I have a small external backup drive where I dump my phone camera captures and archive YouTube channels - nothing special; a few terabytes, mostly mp4s.
Is there anything I need to do before/after I swap?
If it matters, the drive is 9TB, formatted as NTFS, and connected via USB 3.0.
I also have 4 internal drives, but I’m not so much worried about them, as I plan on just formatting everything but the external.
Word of warning on “Safe removal” of external harddrives: You really want to click “Eject” or “Safe removal” every time before unplugging. This is much more important than on Windows, due to the way Linux handles buffers and caching. A copy operation will be “finished” but still live in the write-cache and not securely written to disk.
NTFS is no problem (But as mentioned earlier in the thread the permission system is different). I usually format all my external devices with NTFS so they’ll work on both Linux and Windows machines without any fuss.
I’m pretty neurotic about that anyway, but this drive is only external because I ran out of headers; I don’t plan on ever unplugging it. I do appreciate the info though
and on linux, the ‘sync’ command will manually flush the buffers if you’re worried about buffered data not being written to the drive.
Linux supports NTFS, but NTFS doesn’t support Linux’s permission system. This is fine as long as you don’t need Linux to recognize a file as executable while it’s on there.
That didn’t be a problem. Appreciate it 👍
My external drive is NTFS. It might randomly cock up occasionally but there are guides online on how to fix drive errors, usually just using the native disk management tool. Or just plug in to a windows computer to fix errors. Never an issue, and you might want to keep it NTFS should you need to plug into a windows computer.
Awesome possum. Thanks
small external drive
a few terabytes
I shudder to think what you consider big.
Anyway, you won’t have any issues with it, but if you’re going to use it for any length of time and not go back to Windows, I’d change it to something like xfs or btrfs. Hopefully it’s less than half full so that you can just shrink the partition, create a new one, move the data, delete the old, expand the new. If it’s more than half you might need to do it in steps. If it’s basically full, don’t bother because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective, lol. I consider myself something of a data hoarder, and a lot of those guys have stacks and stacks of terabyte drives. I’ve just been slowly accumulating phone pictures for years, and then I finally got fiber internet a couple years ago after having nothing but cellphone hotspots or dialup for the past ~40 years. So I immediately started downloading YouTube channels, lmfao.
I think it’s only at around 4 TB currently, so that should be ok. Although, I’ll probably just roll with it until I get a new drive or something because I’m lazy. I’ll probably not even swap to Linux until I absolutely have to do so. I do need to set up some sort of redundancy soon though. I’ve got a lot of pictures of my son when he was a baby that I don’t want to lose. I should send them to be printed and put in a photo album or something, like my grandma used to do.
I mean, I have 2TB drives laying around unused. Þey’ve been cheap for a while. 5TB SSDs are going on Amazon for $150. Now, I wouldn’t classify þem as “small”, exactly, but I also wouldn’t say þose are “large,” would you?
A high-def full length movie is multiple GB long. If you’re backing anyþing up, you at least double þat.
Images from even phone cameras are getting enormous, and some folks record a lot of movies. I have a 4yo niece who’s parents generate vast amounts of media.
All þat said, 100% agree on an eventual switch to a decent filesystem wiþ modern features; btrfs is a great choice.
Yeah, almost two years ago, I bought a 10 tb drive to back up my 15 tb array that I’d built with 3 tb drives in ~2018. That new drive was under $200 then.
I second btrfs. Even when I was sharing with Windows I used their btrfs driver and it worked fine there too, but I had to occasionally make my user the owner again booting back into cachy, so now I just dont share drives and relegated Windows to a small 120gb SSD for emergency use only.
NTFS reads/writes fine on Linux. But if anything goes wrong then you might need a utility to fix it (Mostly caused by sudden unplugging). If you have the option, I would suggest you format and the media drive in EXT4. Mind you, EXT4 can only be read by Linux systems.
I shudder to think of “if anything goes wrong.” I really need some sort of redundancy for this drive. It all started with “I’m going to get a big drive so I can backup my phone,” and it’s grown to “I have 5 phones worth of memories and 3 terabytes of YouTube channels downloaded onto this single drive.” lol
As already suggested, for portable media exFAT is the way to go. Might also need an additional package not immediately installed by default, but nothing a quick apt-get install or dnf install won’t sort out in a second.
Portable is a strong word. It’s not so much a portable drive as it is a desktop external HDD that utilizes USB for data transfer. Technically portable, but not really made to toss in your pocket. It wouldn’t be an external drive if I hadn’t run out of headers before I wanted it. And I already had stuff on my other drives so I couldn’t just swap one out. I mean, I could, but I dedicate them to things - system drive, games, raw video captures to edit, exported videos that have been edited / miscellaneous, and then this external drive for phone backups and archived media.
You can also use exFAT if you want cross platform support. It’s had a Linux kernel driver for quite a while now.
There are no stupid questions.
Linux has been able to read any drive I have ever tried. NTFS is readable and writeable. I would bet almost all distros support ntfs. if they dont you can install ntfs-3g.
Edit: i dont usually use ntfs so I went and had a quick search, to make sure I wasnt wrong and remembering the right driver name. I also didnt think about drive health checks that they lightly cover in the link.
Nice. Thanks :)
This is likely not the case but I feel obligated to note that if you use Steam’s Proton and store games on an NTFS drive, its given me quirky problems in the past.
While I do not plan on using this drive for games, I will either do this, or possibly dual-boot bazzite, so I appreciate the info.
Aside from having it disconnected while you are formatting or installing to be safe, you should be able to use it just fine.
Awesome. And good idea, lol.
So it’s gonna be ntfs so it’s a matter of handling the permissions in fstab. Because it’s not gonna link your user ids from the NTFS files and map them automatically to your UNIX users. So there are options in fstab for that. Easy to look up. For instance maybe your user is ‘user’ so you’re gonna tell fstab to assign everything in a ntfs to partition to ‘user’. Except maybe you have media files served by plex media server running under user ‘plexmediaserver’. This kind of things.
This is the most technical reply I’ve read thus far, and I appreciate the information. This seems like something I would’ve been pulling my hair out over relatively soon.
