Mastodawn

mcc

ME: I want a 5 TB hard drive

Amazon: We can do that

Canada Computers: I can give you 12 TB for twice the price

Christine: Wait, Canada Computers has 12 TB drives for *how* much? Get two

Me, walking back from yonge-dundas square the next morning, absolutely twisted, carrying 24 TB of platter drives:

Hey if I want to format an HD for archival purposes, and I want it to be accessible from both Windows* and Linux** without problems, do I use… exfat? Will exfat freak out if I format it at absurdly high sizes like 12 TB, or give me an annoyingly high "minimum file size" or something? Are there any more-reliable/journaled FSes that both these OSes are happy with?

* 10
** Let's say Debian Trixie

Charlotte Mar 1

@mcc chaos option: ntfs as the Linux ntfs driver is pretty good these days.

J.M. Hill Mar 1

@Foritus @mcc was gonna suggest this myself. NTFS is perfectly adequate on Linux nowadays and I imagine it will still improve with time.

Now, assuming we're talking about an actual HDD, data longevity on magnetic media is more likely to present an issue in the long term.

@jmhill @Foritus What other options are there? I was told that flashdrives can lose data if they are unpowered for more than a year and this claim is repeated often on the internet

Zimmie Mar 1

@mcc @jmhill @Foritus While SSDs can lose data when unpowered, that’s more of a boogeyman than a real problem. It’s like cell wear. Problems can be induced under extreme conditions. As long as you stick to the brands which make their own flash, SSDs practically never die from wear, and they almost never lose data even going without power for years.

Zimmie Mar 1

@jmhill @Foritus @mcc The average spinning drive retains data quite a while longer than any other commonly-available writable medium does. SSDs come close, but they’re not quite to the same level as hard drives. For most backup purposes, the right answer is to just trust the media.

If your backups are sensitive enough that spinning drives are untrustworthy long-term, then they’re also untrustworthy short-term, and you need to use something like ZFS with ongoing data integrity checks.

@Foritus @mcc put one giant bcachefs file on ntfs, and mount into that.

@rotopenguin @Foritus is this a serious suggestion?

In what way would it be better than NTFS straight?

Why not bcachefs on exfat?

@mcc @Foritus nah I'm just joshing about a much-worse-case setup. Especially considering that Mr. Bcachefs is a vibe coder.

@rotopenguin @Foritus Okay.

Assuming I understand these things in principle but not in detail and am looking for actual help— used to, when I used macs, I could create a "Sparse Bundle Disk Image" and it was like a hard drive in a file, which could grow and and shrink returning space to the host disk as it shrank, and could be encrypted, and could be compressed. Is this a thing I can do from Linux? What's the best way? (Assume for this one question I no longer care about Windows.)

aeva Mar 1

@mcc @rotopenguin @Foritus so like... a folder?

@aeva @rotopenguin @Foritus A folder has several limitations by comparison. It cannot be compressed, it cannot be encrypted with a different key from the drive which contains it, it cannot be mounted read-only, and it cannot be unmounted.

@mcc @Foritus I don't know of any Linux thing that will automatically grow like a sparse bundle, or take kindly to shrinking at all.

@mcc @Foritus throw the concept of "putting a filesystem inside a file on another filesystem" out, it's just compounding the failure modes.

@rotopenguin @Foritus my experience, across 30-ish years of working with linux, is that filesystems are the worst, most incompatible, and most fragile things you can possibly have to deal with. this is why i am being tetchy about this.

@mcc @Foritus the simplest advice I have is - pick one OS that gets to write to the drive, and stick with that. If Windows is the writer, use NTFS. If Linux, use ext4 or btrfs. If *BSD, ZFS. When you want to put stuff on that drive from some other OS, don't do so directly. Do it as a network share. Or copy it to an exfat flash stick first. Let the appropriate OS do the disk talking.

Sean Eric Fagan Mar 1

@mcc I got the last of my disks shipped to me from the US, and I have about 200TB of storage in the house.

demize Mar 1

@mcc they’ve got 14tb drives for about $500 apparently, which

I need another couple 14tb drives but I don’t $1000 need them… but what if they get more expensive…

(alas, now is not the time for me to buy new hard drives anyway)