Filesystem for backup/storage drives

Nicias · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 318

I have a couple of external drives I use for media storage and offsite (sneakernet) backup. I mostly access them from a gentoo machine, but occasionally access them from my mac. I am not happy with my options in terms of filesystems. I have files bigger than 4Gb, so as I understand it my choices are:

ext2,3,4: OS X doesn't support this. There are various fuse based support options, but none of them seem to offer write access. There is a comercial product from Paragon Software but it looks a little fishy to me.
I could use NTFS, but it doesn't do ownerships and permissions right, so I'd be losing that information.
I could use HFS+ but my gentoo box keeps screwing up the hfsplus drive. It needs significant repairs every time I plug it into the mac, and SMART doesn't report any errors.

Any suggestions?

aCOSwt · Posted: Tue May 01, 2012 7:59 pm Post subject:

If, for backing up, you use tools such as dar (It is OS X compatible AFAIK) then :
- You do not need to worry about file sizes, dar can split into several volumes,
- dar can preserve owner, group, permissions, timestamps and even ext attrs.

Then you put the archive on whatever fs.
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Nicias · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 318

I've just been using rsync. Also, one of the drives is for storage not backup. Thanks for the tip, I'll see if dar works for me.

EatMeerkats · Apprentice Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 234

If you are willing to spend $, you could get http://tenscomplement.com/our-products for Mac and use ZFS. ZFS on Linux has been quite stable for me for a while.

Nicias · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 318

zfs looks interesting, but there isn't even support in ~amd64 yet. I'm not sure I want to be quite bleeding edge.