mccFeb 28

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

Show threadmccMar 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:

Show threadmccMar 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

Show threadCharlotteMar 1
@mcc chaos option: ntfs as the Linux ntfs driver is pretty good these days.
Show threadROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1
@Foritus @mcc put one giant bcachefs file on ntfs, and mount into that.
Show threadmccMar 1

@rotopenguin @Foritus is this a serious suggestion?

In what way would it be better than NTFS straight?

Why not bcachefs on exfat?

Show threadROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1
@mcc @Foritus nah I'm just joshing about a much-worse-case setup. Especially considering that Mr. Bcachefs is a vibe coder.
Show threadmccMar 1

@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.)

Show threadROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1
@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.
Show threadROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1
@mcc @Foritus throw the concept of "putting a filesystem inside a file on another filesystem" out, it's just compounding the failure modes.
Show threadmcc
@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.
Mar 1 at 7:26pmWeb
Show threadROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1
@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.