Filesystem for external harddrive (backup)

[jonte]

Hi.
Planning on buying a WD Mybook Mirror Edition. Raided external HDD which I plan to use as a backup location for my B2. I don't what FS it comes formatted with, but my question is basically the following:

1. Will any filesystem do for the B2 to backup to? (NTFS or HFS+ I guess)
2. If not, is EXT2FS the way to go, and would it be possible to set up RAID1 in the Mybook Mirror (Perhaps a question better suited for WD)

Thanks
//Jonte

[RandomUsername]

I suppose it depends on your use case as to which file system would work best. As I understand it, you can connect any hard drive to the USB port on the Bubba and the Bubba can automatically set it up as a mirror to the internal drive. This is probably the easiest thing to do (presumably the filesystem will be lvm/ext3 as that's what the internal drive gets formatted as). How the fact that your WD box is already a RAID array comes into it I've no idea. It depends if it's recognised as a single drive or not (which I would imagine it is).

The first hit on Google suggest the WD will do RAID 1 so if it all worked nicely together you would then have a three way mirror which is actually a bit redundant in terms of disk space. If the internal drive on your Bubba is big enough (i.e. equal to the total disk space in the WD) I'd suggest a RAID 0 configuration on the WD would be more efficient.

I think my answer has raised more questions than it's answered (in my mind anyway)...

[jonte]

I suppose it depends on your use case as to which file system would work best.

I did some more reading. The disk, and its RAID-controlling software is either for MacOS or Windows, which sounds like HFS+ or NTFS is the way to go in my ears.

I don't intend to use the B2 RAID function, merely have the WD Mirror as backup station with RAID1.

And from reading some more on the forum (http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1804&p=8330), B2 will do read/write to NTFS with the NTFS-3G package from Etch backports. Which answers my question, and (hopefully) solves my problem.

I think my answer has raised more questions than it's answered (in my mind anyway)...

There are always more questions, that's the beauty of it!

Which brings me to another question, is "native" read/write NTFS and HFS+ support for Bubba2 planned for the future?

//Jonte

[jonte]

And from reading some more on the forum (http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1804&p=8330), B2 will do read/write to NTFS with the NTFS-3G package from Etch backports. Which answers my question, and (hopefully) solves my problem.

No need for backports. I installed the NTFS-3g with apt-get, full read/write. Mounted the drive RAIDed 1 inside it's own box, and started a backup-job, looks good so far.