Sunday 23 September 2012

NTFS Limits On Linux

I've come unstuck with my backup approach of using an external USB drive on Linux formatted with NTFS.  Duplicati puts lots of files in a single folder for a big backup.  I ran up against the limitations of ntfsmount.  The ever helpful serverfault hive mind told me I should really be using ext3.  I agreed with them.

Here's the steps to try again.
  1. umount /dev/sdb1
  2. Unplug an copy anything important over to a windows PC
  3. Plug back in
  4. mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
  5. mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbdrive

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can increase the size of the volumes that Duplicati stores easily. For a backup to a local drive, a file size of 1GB seems fine.

Unknown said...

That's really good advice. I've increased my volume size to 100MB. I'll see how it performs.