Topic: USB disk

[jonash]

Hello,
I just bought a external USB disk, which I will use for backup. It would also be nice to be able to use in on some windows host. At the moment the file system is vfat, which is read/writeable from Ubuntu. Is this a good choose of file system type, id I want to use it on both Unix and Windows?

Jonas

[jonash]

Whoops,  everything is covered here:
http://wiki.contribs.org/USBDisks

[dgs]

Another Ext2 Installable File System for Windows worth a look can be found at http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html .

[mercyh]

dgs,

That looks cool if it works like it says. Do you use it in real life production machines?

I would be very cautious with the following from their docs:

The current version of the Ext2 file system driver does not maintain access rights. All users can access all the Ext2 volumes that a drive letter is created for. For example, if a drive letter has been created for an Ext2 volume, which is the root volume of a Linux installation, you can simply read and modify files such as /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. User names are readable and passwords of these users can be quite easily cracked and modified!

The security is a concern but creating an unbootable system is a larger concern.

[dgs]

Real life in production machines, no. 

I've tested it on a development box and thus far have found no problems, but testing has been far from exhaustive. I've read from a few disks without problems, and written some files to them and can read them when the disk is returned to a Linux box.

 I'd recommend anyone does their own testing before relying on this. On first impressions it works very well.