1TB external HDD: need partitioning recommendations

[Sylvander]

QUESTIONS:

1. One big partition best or not?

2. Leave most of the space unallocated for now?

3. Which file system is best for backup/restore using Puppy?

4. NTFS: does Puppy work well with it or not?

Here's the new external enclosure.

Here's the new HDD.

[Patriot]

Hmmm .....

1. One big partition best or not?
2. Leave most of the space unallocated for now?
3. Which file system is best for backup/restore using Puppy?
4. NTFS: does Puppy work well with it or not?

1. Depends on what you want to do ...
2. It depends on your needs ...
3. No comment (I use ghost mostly).
4. Yes, as long as you use the latest ntfs-3g ... My experience with the april'09 release of ntfs-3g have been very positive. Haven't had a single minor/majoe issue with ntfs partitions since using it ... YMMV ...


Rgds

[Flash]

I have a 1 TB hard disk which is formatted NTFS and has Windows installed on it. I boot Puppy from a DVD so I can use Pcdripper and Pawdioconverter to turn CDs into mp3s, which I save on the NTFS hard disk. I've been doing this for years without any problems.

[DMcCunney]

QUESTIONS:

1. One big partition best or not?

2. Leave most of the space unallocated for now?

3. Which file system is best for backup/restore using Puppy?

4. NTFS: does Puppy work well with it or not?

What do you plan to do with it?

I multi-boot Puppy on an old notebook, which also hosts Ubuntu and Win2K. It has a 40GB drive, with 19GB for Windows, 8GB apiece for Ubuntu and Puppy, a one MB swap area, and a 2GB FAT32 slice.

Win2K is NTFS. Ubuntu and Puppy are both on ext4 file systems.

I can access the Windows partition from Linux, and copy files to it or retrieve files from it. Among other things, it's a "safe" stirage area, unaffected if I have a problem on the Linux side.

If I were putting Puppy on a 1TB drive in a "frugal" install, booting of CD or DVD, I'd leave the entire drive as NTFS. If I were doing a Full install, I'd carve out a partition for Puppy and use a Linux file system. Puppy can access an NTFS partition just fine, but I don't believe it can live on one.
______
Dennis

[William (Dthdealer)]

My recommendation - see attached

[DMcCunney]

My recommendation - see attached

NB: there are a couple of different third party drivers for Windows that let it see and access ext2/ext3 file systems.
______
Dennis

[Sylvander]

1. Sorry guys, but I couldn't restrain my eagerness to proceed.
The drive has been partitioned and formatted, and existing backups transferred from the old/small [80GB] external HDD to the new.
Partition is 200GB.
File system on the partition is ext3.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Backups are:
43GB Pudd .img.gz image backup file of the whole of the internal 80GB HDD.
Plus:
Snap2 snapshots of the following internal partitions:
sda1+sda5: Windows=C: 6GB FAT32 and Windows-data=D: FAT32 1GB.
sda3: BoxPup 3GB ext3.
sda6: Windows E: 25GB FAT32 data partition.
sda7: Windows F: 17GB FAT32 data partition.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2. @Patriot
(a) "1. Depends on what you want to do ..."
Generally, hold backups = Pudd images, and snap2 snapshots, plus anythings else that comes along.
(b) "2. It depends on your needs ..."
The old 80GB external backup wasn't quite big enough; probably at least about 100GB needed initially, but who knows what will happen in the future.
(c) "3. No comment (I use ghost mostly)"
Puppy->[Pudd & snap2] would probably work best with a Linux partition file system [ext3?], but it would have been convenient to use NTFS so that my Win2000Pro could access.
But then I'm told NTFS will not preserve file permissions, which tends to rule it out, in my opinion.

3.@DMcCunney
(a) "Ubuntu and Puppy are both on ext4 file systems"
Are there no problems?
Can all Puppies work with ext4?

(b) "there are a couple of different third party drivers for Windows that let it see and access ext2/ext3 file systems"
Yes, I used one in the past, and still have the installation file, but...
I grew concerned that Windows might get infected or hacked, and then the contents of the Linux partitions would be at risk.
I uninstalled the driver to remove Windows access to the Linux partitions.

[lstandish]

Hi Sylvander,

I know you already bought your 1 TB external enclosure, but I'd recommend to everyone a 2-drive hardware mirror RAID USB/eSata enclosure instead of a simple one-drive USB enclosure.

I recently bought one and installed 2 one-TB hard drives into it. This gives me 1 TB of redundant storage. The entire 1 TB on each drive is a single ext3 partition. I bought it here for about USD$110.

Connected to my Linux boxes via USB2, I get about 25 MB read and 22 MB write speeds, which is plenty fast enough for me.

Essentially, whatever I store on this device is automatically "mirrored" onto both drives. This is a form of automatic backup, since it is highly unlikely that both drives of a mirror RAID will fail at the same time. When (not "if") a hard drive fails, you just pull out its "tray" and plug a new drive in, and the RAID automatically rebuilds itself using the new drive.

PS If you run a samba server on your Puppy, then Windows AND Linux machines connected to your LAN can read and write to the USB-connected RAID. And you just built yourself an inexpensive NAS (Network Attached Storage) server.