From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Sep 23 20:19:11 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC0D8106566C for ; Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:19:11 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mail@ozzmosis.com) Received: from smtp.mel.people.net.au (smtp.mel.people.net.au [218.214.17.98]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id E15C28FC12 for ; Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:19:10 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mail@ozzmosis.com) Received: (qmail 1928 invoked from network); 23 Sep 2008 20:18:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO blizzard.dnsalias.org) (218.215.144.151) by smtp.mel.people.net.au with SMTP; 23 Sep 2008 20:18:54 -0000 Received: by blizzard.dnsalias.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id B7BBE17084; Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:19:06 +1000 (EST) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:19:06 +1000 From: andrew clarke To: Andreas Davour Message-ID: <20080923201906.GB63895@ozzmosis.com> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Filesystem of choice for a Linux/FreeBSD shared backup disk? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:19:11 -0000 On Tue 2008-09-23 17:17:21 UTC+0200, Andreas Davour (ante@Update.UU.SE) wrote: > I've bought a usb connected disk to use as backup, and I've been > thinking about trying to make the data as available as possible. Do > anyone here have any suggestion about what kind of filesystem would be > best to use? Can ufs2 be read by linux? It looks like it from my short > persual of google hits, but it also looks kind of complicated. IS ext2 a > safer bet? Anything totally different? > > Any filesystem that can handle data from both BSD and Linux without too > much metadata mangling would do. I'm not sure about UFS support in Linux. You would probably need to ask on a Linux list. The man page for newfs says that you can create UFS1 filesystems with it, which may help with compatibility? mount_ext2fs is available in FreeBSD but I can't speak for its reliability. There is full read/write support for NTFS provided by sysutils/fusefs-ntfs in the Ports tree. I suspect there are some limitations though, eg. tighter restrictions than UFS on what characters are permitted in filenames. For making backups I would probably just use FAT32 and tar, because practically anything (not just FreeBSD & Linux) will mount FAT32 file systems, and tar should respect your file attributes (owner, group, creation timestamp, last modified timestamp, etc).