Mastodawn

Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Portable-External-Drive-WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN/dp/B07X41PWTY

Amazon.ca

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mcc Mar 1

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:

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mcc Mar 1

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

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Charlotte Mar 1

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

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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.

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Zimmie

@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.