Should I use VFAT or ext3 for a 1TB external USB hard drive?

Question

I have a 1 TB external USB hard drive which I want to use to backup data from my home and office desktops (both running Linux).
Should I format the drive (possibly split into a few partitions) as VFAT or ext3?

I don't anticipate using the drive with Windows very often so this is not a primary concern. The main thing holding me back from just using ext3 is the problems you can have when two different users (home and work accounts) try to access each others data.

Is there any way to mount an ext3 drive with user id mapping?

Solution 1

Definitely ext3/4 over VFAT.

• Ext3/4 are journaling file systems, which means no fragmentation issues.
• Read/writes will be significantly faster with Ext.
• VFAT has a 4 GB maximum file-size, which can come back to haunt you when you need to store a large file on it after you already have it loaded up with data.

Solution 2

If you only want to access it from linux I'd go with ext3 at any rate.

The issues with VFAT are that you will lose much of the overall capacity due to fragmentation and it access will be noticeably slower.

For the permissions, that has not been much of a problem for me so far. Either I don't care about the permissions, then I make the files world readable on my USB or eSATA drives or I do care then I tar the stuff.

Comments

[Iván Pérez]

Why do you say that a file system with journaling prevents fragmentation issues? Doesn't for example NTFS has a journaling file and is still prone to fragmentation? Journaling prevents data loss on power failure.

[phuclv]

journalling has nothing to do with fragmentation. It's just the ability to fix up things automatically to prevent dataloss on events like power loss