gawguy Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 Hello Guys, Just bought used 5 more discs for my 1 gb Jaz drive and I bought an Orb External HD w/ 4 discs 2.2 gb. So I am well set for my backup needs. $75 for all! Good deal, huh? I have to format the discs as they were setup for Mac. The format choices are FAT, FAT32, NTFS. There is also a check box to "enable compression." I probably will want to store compressed files. Does anyone know the details of these choices? What is best? I set up my main drive with NTFS. Thanks, GG Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Straycat Posted July 30, 2003 Report Share Posted July 30, 2003 There was recently a thread about file systems right here! As for the "enable compression" box, I think you'll want to leave that unchecked. I'm not sure -- but I think it enables automatic compression on files you store on the disk. That will probably only uneccesarily slow down the process of file storage. If you want to compress files, you'd be better off to do it yourself (thru WinRAR or some such). My two cents. Correct me if I'm wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted July 31, 2003 Report Share Posted July 31, 2003 Hi gawguy, I guess you like to store the backups of your system on the disks. In this case leave the 'enable compression' disabled cause when you create the backups you can set the level of compression for the backup file(s). No need to compress twice, right? For the file system you got a lot of opinions from the other threat. Given that you only connect these drives to your computer it doesn't matter. If you want to connect to an machine with Win 9x you have to use FAT32. with Win 2K and Win XP you can use either FAT32 or NTFS. Good luck with the backups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
think_too_mut Posted July 31, 2003 Report Share Posted July 31, 2003 >The format choices are FAT, FAT32, NTFS. There is also a check box to "enable compression." I probably will want to store compressed files. That seems to be NTFS compression. It's NTFS's decisssion what to compress what not. Files backed up that way can only be read by NTFS or you may need other utilities if transporting your backup discs to another PC that is not running NTFS. It's not like win-zipping the files. I would leave it unchecked. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZMAN Z28 Posted July 31, 2003 Report Share Posted July 31, 2003 If you like others said plan on transfering between different versions of windows, ie Win 98/ Win Me/ 2000/ or XP, then I would format using Fat 32. If you are only going to use 2000 or XP ONLY, then use NTFS, but remember Anything older then Windows 2000 won't be able to read it. I know Windows NT operating system uses NTFS 4, and not sure on the compatablility on this. ZMAN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritTim Posted August 1, 2003 Report Share Posted August 1, 2003 There are fixes available for NT4 to enable it to read later NTFS versions (i.e. those used by Win 2K & Win XP) Some people claim that FAT32 (and no compression) is better for backups in that recovery is easier if anything gets damaged. My own opinion is that NTFS is best in most cases, but (if you want compression) be careful to use compression tools that are tolerant of read errors. Backups are often needed years after they were originally made, and restoration problems are not uncommon. Do not use NTFS compression unless you also need password protection and recognise the very real risk of not being able to recover stuff later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.