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 threadunnick
@mcc @rotopenguin @Foritus you could create a sparse file with truncate -s 15T the_file[1], create a btrfs filesystem on it with mkfs.btrfs the_file[2], and mount it with sudo mount -o discard the_file /mnt[3]. heres a demo of that (doas does basically the same thing as sudo, i just absentmindedly switched midway through)

[1] 15 TiB is the max that ext4 lets me create, you can try increasing it if your filesystem supports it. this size will limit how much you can store inside the file.
[2] i chose btrfs over ext4 because btrfs can support compression, and also doesnt need to preallocate space for inodes/metadata.
[3] the -o discard lets it shrink the file when you delete stuff.
Mar 1 at 8:05pmWeb
Show threadunnickMar 1
@mcc to enable compression you can do btrfs property set /mnt compression zstd (where /mnt is the place you mounted the_file to), btrfs doesnt do compression by default