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Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups

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On 13/08/2020 12:14, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm getting closer to setting up a consistent backup plan, backing up to an
> external USB drive.  I'm wondering about a reasonable filesystem to use, I
> think I want to stay in the ext2/3/4 family, and I'm wondering if there is any
> good reason to use anything beyond ext2?

I use and recommend ext4. Journaling protects against filesystem 
metadata corruption, which can be caused by an electrical outage or 
system crash. ext3 also has journaling, but I see no reason to not use 
ext4. It is robust, widely deployed, and the default in Debian.

My backups are pigz-compressed tar archives, encrypted with gpg 
symmetric encryption, with a "pigz -0" outer wrapper to add a 32-bit 
checksum wrapper for convenient verification with "gzip -tv" or similar 
without requiring decryption. Archives are written to both external 
local storage and uploaded to cloud storage.

Because I have a small number of large backup files, I make backup 
filesystems to optimise for large files and maximise space: minimal 
journal, no reserved blocks, large file inode ratio, and no support for 
resizing while mounted. I also disable mount count and interval checking:

mkfs.ext4 -J size=4 -m 0 -T largefile4 -O "^resize_inode" /dev/sdb1
tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 -L Backup /dev/sdb1

I have this line in /etc/fstab:

LABEL=Backup /media/backup ext4 noatime,noauto,user,errors=remount-ro 0 0

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz>
Director
Transient Software Limited <https://transient.nz/>
New Zealand

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Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups rhkramer@gmail.com - 2020-08-13 02:20 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Keith Bainbridge <keithrbaugroups@gmail.com> - 2020-08-13 02:40 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz> - 2020-08-13 03:00 +0200
    Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-08-13 11:00 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Mark Allums <maa@allums.com> - 2020-08-13 03:20 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for  backups Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> - 2020-08-13 05:20 +0200
    Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-08-13 11:00 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-08-13 10:40 +0200
    Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Tom Dial <tddial@comcast.net> - 2020-08-13 20:10 +0200
      Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups rhkramer@gmail.com - 2020-08-13 22:00 +0200
        Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-08-13 22:20 +0200
          Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2020-08-13 22:40 +0200
            Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-08-13 23:00 +0200
              Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups ghe2001 <ghe2001@protonmail.com> - 2020-08-13 23:40 +0200
                Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Jonathan Dowland <jon+debian-user@dow.land> - 2020-08-14 11:40 +0200
                Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2020-08-14 12:00 +0200
          Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups rhkramer@gmail.com - 2020-08-14 03:30 +0200
            Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-08-14 07:10 +0200
        Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Tom Dial <tddial@comcast.net> - 2020-08-14 04:50 +0200
    Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-08-20 00:10 +0200
      Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Ben Caradoc-Davies <ben@transient.nz> - 2020-08-20 01:40 +0200
        Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2020-08-20 04:20 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for  backups local10 <local10@tutanota.com> - 2020-08-13 21:50 +0200
  Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-08-14 07:30 +0200
    Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2020-08-14 17:40 +0200
      Re: Recommendation for filesystem for USB external drive for backups Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-08-15 13:00 +0200

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