I know, I know. I really shouldnât use NTFS with Linux if I plan to write to it, especially not my only backup drive, which is my external media drive for libreELEC as well.
So I was moving/copying/renaming stuff through SMB on my libreELEC machine. And then suddenly I noticed 50 episodes of old-school Sonic animated series just⊠disappeared. Strange, but I continued renaming files, and those too poof nonexistent anymore.
Okay, maybe a Dolphin bug - I thought, since I was using Dolphin for SMB. But same from Android (Iâm using Solid Explorer)
Then, Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex too disappeared. Then some episode of Serial Experiments Lain.
Star Trek Discovery? Fucking gone, tho I didnât mind that one. All of the files are 0B. Then Regular Show.
Now, this was the point where I needed to step in. Linux just didnât see the files.
Oh well, I have a Windows 10 PC I use for work so it was a time for bringing the drive âhomeâ and give it some chkdsk, in the meantime I was really hoping it wouldnât just destroy my 4TB backup drive. Wasnât sure it would work, but that was pretty much my only hope and idea. Trying to access those folders and files from Windows gave me error messages before the check.
The check and fix dialog of chkdsk was also kinda fucked, the progressbar jumped around, didnât make any sense BUT it restored my files. Hooray!
Except SAC, it was still unreadable from Windows, but! Linux does see all the episodes so I guess itâs a win⊠of some sort. It sill bothers me there is some - from Windowsâs point of view - invalid files and folders on my BACKUP disk, but this will be another story.
It turned out, libreELEC is using ntfs-3 (and not 3g), which is famous for this kind of errors - files disappearing and the filesystem becoming funky.
So, I ordered a drive just for my media and media PC, tho no idea how to format it (to be readable from anywhere else - maybe exFAT?)
But this scared me like hell đ
Just wanted to share this with you guys, thereâs no moral of the story, except do not use ntfs heavily under Linux, or at least do not write it a lot, which is a known thing since forever, I was just a lazy ass, donât be like me, please, unless you have a Windows machine around and some luck. But relying on these two, wellâŠ
Cheers!
Update: I formatted my new media drive to ext4. In the end, itâll be a fixed disk under my TV in a linux box, this seemed to be the best choice. I donât think Iâll pick it out and use it elsewhere that much or at all.
Everyone needs at least two backups: one local and one remote in case of natural catastrophe. Glad you came out ok.
yeah, well, I really need a better backup system, I almost lost my stuff countless times now. TestDisk saved my ass everytime on more major fuckups, but sooner or later Iâll burn myselfâŠ
Backblaze and
rsyncwith a network or external drive.https://samuelhewitt.com/blog/2018-06-05-time-machine-style-backups-with-rsync
Iâll raise you one and attach a mount point over iscsi!
Donât you threaten me! đ
Ah, now thatâs a scare! Glad you mostly managed to recover at any rate.
As for the fs to use, exfat is probably a safer bet but btrfs is also an option. Iâve used winbtrfs in the past and it works surprisingly well.
DO NOT USE WIN BTRFS. Recently I used a current version and it fucked up my btrfs filesystem in a way that was almost impossible to diagnose and fix.
Right, thanks for the input. I used to use it for unimportant stuff like game storage so itâs entirely possible errors just went unnoticed đ
It is in Alpha
But I donât think BTRFS can be used on a backup drive because it often needs backups lol
Said drive is a new one for media and regular everyday usage, not the existing backup drive according to the OP. Btrfs is more than stable enough barring specific RAID configurations, at any rate.
Thanks for the tip. Though I wouldnât mind if it would work on almost anything - even like Android or some older systems. Not a real need, just would be nice if I could plug mymedia drive into anything and watxh stuff from it (maybe even from older, not smart TVs if itâs possible)
Yeah I guess exfat is the way to go then, itâs how I handle my external SSD rn as well
Edit: Also, Iâm not sure how well btrfs handles external drives. Didnât realize that when I suggested it.
But I donât think BTRFS can be used on a backup drive because it often needs backups lol
Donât use ext4 for that data. Use btrfs
Also one copy of the data is zero copies and 2 copies is one copy.
Also one copy of the data is zero copies and 2 copies is one copy.
ah, just like with beer
Just another thing to consider with exFAT is that it doesnât support having symlinks written on it. (for example, if your exFAT drive is located at /mnt/exfat, doing
ln -s ~/Documents/cool-document.txt /mnt/exfat/will fail) Idk if thatâs a problem for your use case, but just so youâre aware.I do have a drive that is formatted with exFAT that I made with the intention of having it be readable by both Linux and Windows, but I ended up not really using windows ever lmao. It should be fine if youâre just using it to store media
Something happened to me like that but I was not able to recover the data. I will thy to do as you did.
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IIRC, exFAT is still a fuse module, but FAT32 is kernel native, if thatâs a thing that matters (in case youâre ever on a Linux where you canât install fuse+exFAT).
Thereâs been an exFAT driver in the kernel for a couple of years now (merged after Microsoftâs patent pact added ExFAT), it works fine. Same driver gets used on Android for SD card support.
Ah cool, I knew there was patent problems keeping it out, but I also havenât used a USB drive of any meaningful size in a while (I went NAS over removable storage) but thatâs nice that thereâs a âuniversalâ file system.
will FAT32 work on 2TB volume?
Yes it will but it wont be able to handle +4 GB files
noice!
edit: oh, it WONâT work >4GB, misread that at first. Then not really noice in the end :/ Movies could be larger than 4GB (tho kinda rarely, I never go above full hd)