Re: Filesystem format for external hard disk

[Paul Smith <phhs80@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Bryn M. Reeves <bmr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> I have got a new external hard disk, which I would like to use as
>>> a mirror of my home directory (for backup purpose). What format
>>> for the external disk filesystem do you recommend? And what the
>>> proper command to accomplish the formatting?
>>>
>>
>> ### End of Message from Paul Smith ###
>>
>> For best advice, more information would be helpful... For example,
>> what's your retention policy?  If you only need a single backup,
>> and not historical backups *and* you are using LVM, you might
>> consider just storing LVM snaphots on the backup drive. If you want
>> a more flexible solution, you might try using rsync. Tar and dump
>> are also still used.
>
> That would mean you would need to add the external disk to the system
> VG (in order to be able to snapshot logical volumes from the system).
>
> Generally that's a bad idea: if you're spreading VGs over multiple
> devices, especially with snapshotting, you typically want redundancy
> below the VG (i.e. mirrored or RAIDed PVs). You could also use LVM
> mirroring but then you're adding more complexity to the configuration.
>
> Things can also get ugly here if the backup disk is not going to be
> present at all times (for one thing if you do ever add one to your
> system VG you'll probably need to update the initramfs to ensure it
> contains the required modules for the external device).
>
>> As far as your specific question, you need the name of the device,
>> and I recommend creating a UDEV rule so that every time you plug in
>> the external hard drivei, the partition you backup to gets the SAME
>> link in /dev. This can save you from accidentally backing up to a
>> thumbdrive that was also in the USB port, or maybe a different hard
>> drive. Let's
>
> You can also just set a label on it - udisks and the modern desktop
> environments will then mount it under the media directory with a name
> based on the label and this will propagate to other systems you may
> use the device on without the need to copy rules files around the place.

Thanks for all replies. What I do is to run, from time to time, the
following command:

rsync -av --delete /home/psmith/ /media/IOmega/backups/myhome/

I have already an external disk formatted with ext3, but for safety
reasons I am now wanting to have two external disks with the same
backups. When I formatted the first external disk, I did not know
about ext4 (only knew about ext3). So, from what you are suggestion,
ext4 is superior to ext3?

Paul
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