Back In Time

External USB Hard Drive as source

Asked by chaghaboo

I'm planing to use BiT to keep my backup at external usb hard drive that is originally FAT formated. So, my questions are:
1. Will hard links work as I found this "(NOTE: FAT don’t support hard-links)" at your site and I'm not sure what it means?
2. Will permissions stay unchanged after restoring files?
3. Would you recommend me to reformat hdd to some other file system?

Fantastic tool, congratulations!

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Dan (danleweb) said : 		#1

If you use your USB Hard FAT formated drive as source it should be no problem.
Your destination should support hard-links. Hard-links are just to reduce disk space for unchanged files.
FAT does not support linux permissions. The driver fake some permissions.

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#2

Thanks for quick answer Dan,

just need clarification on permissions. What I want to avoid is that after restore I get files that are locked (read-only) even they originally were not. Changing permissions for each individual file in that case would take me ages.

Do you think that I won't have problem with this as drive is FAT formated?
And generally what file system you would recommend to be at snapshot destination (no matter if it's external hdd, usb or other)?

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#3

I made a backup of everything I wanted, around 20 GB, and just 10 minutes after I wanted to test it so I made one more snapshot. Even nothing changed within documents BiT made one more full backup instead of doing nothing as nothing changed. As result I got 20 GB less available on my external HDD, so it seems that hard links are not working.

Is this because of FAT file system? If it's about that I'm ready to reformat it to other file system and give it a try again.

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Best Dan (danleweb) said : 		#4

What is your destination backup filesystem ? If it is FAT then ... maybe this is the cause.
If you want your USB drive to be readable from Windows and Linux that you have to use FAT or NTFS.
NTFS is better because it support hard-links (but it does not support linux permissions).
If Windows compatibility is not a problem for you then can use any Linux filesystem: ext3/4 will do just fine.

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#5

I don't have a problem with Windows compatibility, so I'll reformat it, test it and will back to you asap.

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#6

Thanks Dan, that solved my question.

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#7

I unintentionally clicked on "this solved my problem". Sorry for making a mess.

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#8

I formated hdd into ext3 and now everything works perfect!

Hard links are working great, BiT is not making full backups over and over again, but only things that changed since last backup. After restoring files they keep permissions so that's fine as well.

Cheers!

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chaghaboo (marko.niketic) said : 		#9

Thanks Dan, that solved my question.