External hard drive, what FS to use...
External hard drive of 2TB, what filesystem to use and to protect the disk?
The main concern is portability, I might need to use the disk in other OS or distro.
The second concern is safety, if I lose the disk I would have important data lost with it.
So, I was thinking to use udf as filesystem as it seems well supported everywhere nowadays:
mkudffs --blocksize=512 --media-type=hd --utf8 --lvid="soandso" --vid="soandso" --fsid="soandso" /dev/sdZ
And keep a directory inside protected via veracrypt since it also seems to support Linux, OSX, and Windows.
What do you think? Any flaw in this plan? What do you suggest?
Last edited by ezzetabi (2014-12-04 13:10:14)
Interesting... I was in a similar situation recently. I've never heard of UDF before. In my situation I went with FAT32 for ease of use and compatability.
Does UDF support journaling? If not, what would make UDF a better choice over FAT32?
I found a few websites that discussed using UDF on an external drive. It seems possible but a little weird or tricky to setup properly.
Similar Messages
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What format i should use for my external hard drive that can be used interchangeably between mac and pc?
Usually Fat32/MS-DOS as mentioned, but that has several limitatiuns, like 4GB filesize limit.
One option is MacDrive for you PCs... allows them to Read/Write HFS+...
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
More options...
NTFS-3G Stable Read/Write Driver...
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
MacFUSE: Full Read-Write NTFS for Mac OS X, Among Others...
http://www.osnews.com/story/16930 -
i have downloaded mavericks to my external hard drive, what do I do next to go back to using Mavericks?
I would not use Time Machine for this task. Rather I suggest you clone to the external drive. You can then boot from the external drive to restore your clone. First, purchase Carbon Copy Cloner.
Clone using Carbon Copy Cloner
1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.
3. Select the Destination volume from the right side dropdown menu.
4. Click on the Clone button.
5. When completed select Disk Center from the Window menu.
6. Click on the Recovery HD tab then select the backup drive from the list.
7. Click on the button labeled "Create a Recovery partition for this volume."
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
You now have a fully bootable copy of your iMac's hard drive. When you receive your iMac back after the drive replacement you can boot it from this backup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore the backup from the external drive to the internal drive. The process is identical except you will switch the Source and Destination volumes - Source will be the external drive; Destination will be the internal drive.
Because the newly installed drive will most likely have OS X installed you can skip Steps 5-7. You can now continue to use your external backup drive by setting up scheduled backups with CCC. No need to use Time Machine. -
My macbook pro's memory is full and I purchased an external hard drive. I am using timemachine, but need to earse/free up some memory on my laptop. How do I do this?
Christinag1317 wrote:
My macbook pro's memory is full and I purchased an external hard drive. I am using timemachine, but need to earse/free up some memory on my laptop. How do I do this?
Ok when you refer to "memory" that is the Random Access Memory which is temporary memory the processor (worker) uses to store stuff while it's using it. Power goes off whats in the memory is gone.
Your storage drive is where data is pernamnetly stored if the power is on/off.
So what you really mean to say is your storage drive is filled up and you need to make some room.
You have a TimeMachine drive, what this does is makes a image of your internal storage drive as a backup method, it also allows some "back in time" restoration of your previous deleted files depending how much space is on that drive. The more space, the less data you have, the more days you can go back in time to retrieve something.
Unfortunatly the TimeMachine drive is not a extra space storage drive, it automatically rotates what appears on your internal storage drive. So if you delete something from the internal drive, it eventually gets deleted from the TimeMachine drive.
So you need to make some more room on your internal drive, this is rather easy, all you need is ANOTHER external drive and connect it to the Mac. Give it a name like ExtraStorage#1 and thenyou will have to decide which of your User files you really don't need on the internal drive.
For instance the best choice would be to move some movies out of your Movies folder to another MoviesExtra folder on the ExtraStorage#1 drive.
Movies take a LOT of drive space and you can always copy them on or off, or watch them from the ExtraStorage#1 drive as well. But if your going to do this a lot, you should consider getting a Firewire 800/400, USB 3,2,1 combination drive as Firewire 800 is fastest and decently priced (Thunderbolt is very high priced and overkill at this time)
The other things like Documents are quite small, Pictures can take a lot of space if you have a lot, but if you need them on the internal drive then that's better. Music one tends to use a lot or manage playlists and such, but perhaps some music you may which to move off or "prune", I suggest always burning data DVD's of music especially for extra backups.
Once you have freed some room on the internal drive, this liitle neat program will show you what is taking the largest amount of space on your internal drive.
http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
After a scan, right click on the big squares to "revel in Finder" to show you what's taking the largest amount of space, be warned it also opens up hidden system files and folders, which you won't be able to move. So concentrate on what's inthe Users folder.
Likely if you have a lot of Movies this is the biggest culprit on most standard internal hard drives. Also if you have something in iTunes that's auto-downloading something like PodCasts and not deleting the older ones and you forget. So go there and fix things and that can free up drive space.
If you bought a small SSD with your new Mac, then the price of that SSD has come back to haunt you with low storage space, you will have to think carefully what you can live without on the internal drive.
Once you have slimmed things down, TimeMachine will update to reflect your slimmer internal drive. What this means is there is only one copy of your data on the ExtraStorage#1 drive.
You need to maintain two copies of your data at all times on seperate hardware, so now you need ANOTHER storage drive (ExtraStorage#2) to copy everythinng of ExtraStorage#1, or else if you drop or have a mechanical problem with ES#1 all that data will be gone!
If you wish to learn more then I suggest reading these two links
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201
http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html -
just got Prosoft drive genius 3 software, and it's telling me that the external hard drive that i am using for my time machine back up drive needs to be defragmented. is it wise to do this or should i not??
Let's hope a couple things: that you have bootable clones of your drives also; that the backup drive for TimeMachine has over 3x capacity of the data you plan and are storing. I would also switch TM backup drives so you have a 2nd.
Fragmented free space affecting performance happens when the drive is too full which may mean there isn't enough free space for a full backup set.
1.5TB for backing up 500GB, while WD Green 3TB is $140 and WD Black 1.5TB is, about the same price.
I'd be worried about the integrity and directory, and whether you can afford to lose that drive. Defragging is also a very slow operation. the ideal: to just clone a drive, or start over with another drive and wait. cloning TM volumes has not been done or has it? SuperDuper hoped to but I don't think they or Bombich's CCC made it there.
Trouble with highly fragged is when free space gets to 20% normally, 1/3 or so though for TM volumes, and finding where and a chunk of space for the file being written. Does TM use large spare image files of like 2GB?
Best would be to ask in the TimeMachine section Snow Leopard
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard?view= discussions#/?tagSet=1009
where there are some good FAQ and tutorials, and people that know the ins-and-outs and shortcomings. -
HT201250 Do I need to partition my external hard drive if I'm using Time Machine and other storage?
I never used Time Machine before. I was storing select files on my external hard drive as well as using my libraries (IPhoto, ITune, IMovies) directly off of the external hard drive. That hard drive is giving me problems, so I bought a new one. I want to set up Time Machine on this one, but I also want to keep my active libraries on it. Do I need to partition the external hard drive?
You can partition the new drive, just don't make one of the partitons a TimeMachine drive, save a TM for a entire drive with more space than the boot drive as it saves "states" thus requires more room than most people expect.
I highly advise one drive to one drive for backups, and not placing too many backup eggs in one vulnerable hardware basket basically.
Drives are cheap, data is not. Hardware can fail just as often as software, so you need a multiple backup and storage stragedy to protect even against theft and fire.
Most commonly used backup methods -
Final cut is not reading events or projects from my external hard drive, what can I do?
Final Cut X is not reading events of projects from my external hard drive, what can i do?
Like this
Cmd-Shift-4. Drag a box around the area to capture. Screen shot appears on the desktop. Click the camera button in the message reply window. -
I have a tried to format my seagate free agent 1TB external hard drive so I can use it, but I keep getting an error message saying it failed. Can n e 1 help me plz
This article has a link for more information on finding your profile directory: [[Fix the "Could not initialize the application's security component" error message]]. On Windows 7, you can try this (either in a Windows Explorer window address bar or from the start menu search box):
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
You may see one folder in there and that's the one you want. If you see more than one, look for the one with the most recently modified files. -
Does anyone use a LaCie external hard drive with their Mac using imovie '09? I have some questions.
Does anyone use a LaCie external hard drive with their Mac using imovie '09? I have some questions.
Are you actually having a problem with the new Lacie drive, or are you just asking is the Lacie drive somehow different from your old G-Drive?
From a connection standpoint, most Lacie desktop drives have both USB and FireWire connections, just like the G-Drives do. You would connect and use it the same as a G-Drive.
Regarding capturing to the external HD, if you are using a camcorder that has FireWire (iLink) connection, it is not advisable to have an external FireWire HD connected to your Mac at the same time as your camcorder; there are often communication conflicts between the camcorder and the hard drive if they are connected at the same time. The conflicts usually appear as either dropped frames or a complete freeze. This is more common with Canon miniDV camcorders but I have also seen this behavior with Sony miniDV camcorders. (The problem is the camcorder's FW implementation, not the hard drive.) The workaround is to capture to your Mac's internal HD and later copy the captured video to your external HD. -
I bought an external hard drive for backups to use with Time Machine, but however when I try to connect it with the other windows laptop it doesn't work ? intact it doesn't work on any other device except my MAC ?
Do not worry about it.
Time Machine needs that your external drive is formatted in HFS+, or better known as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". This filesystem is used by Apple on Macs and Windows cannot read or write drives formatted with this filesystem, being this the reason why all your devices do not read the external drive except your Mac.
You can only use your external drive to make Time Machine drives. If you store anything different, you may damage the Time Machine structure, so it is better not to use it as a drive to store other data. Instead, get another external drive to do it or create a second partition on the external drive formatted in FAT32 by using Disk Utility > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU3.html FAT32 can be read by Windows PCs -
I had Leopard on may Mac. I upgraded to Mountain Lion using Snow Leopard. I can't use my video with Mountain Lion. Can I load Snow Leopard on an external hard drive so I can use it with my camera?
First, you cannot do this if you have a Boot Camp partition.
Second: Create a new partition.
1. Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
After the main menu appears select Disk Utility and click on the Continue button. Select the hard drive's main entry then click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
2. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. (Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
It would be wise to have a backup of your current system as resizing is not necessarily free of risk for data loss. Your drive must have sufficient contiguous free space for this process to work.
Third: Install Snow Leopard.
Boot from your Snow Leopard DVD. Follow instructions for installation being sure that before you actually install Snow Leopard you have selected the new partition as your target destination.
Booting From An OS X Installer Disc
1. Insert OS X Installer Disc into the optical drive.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.
4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple logo
appears.
5. Wait for installer to finish loading. -
So I am trying to copy my hard drive "Macintosh HD" to an external hard drive, i want to use Terminal and have tried many ways. For example cp -r /Volumes/"Macintosh HD" /Volumes/"NO NAME". When i do it says No such file or directory. Ideas?
The reason that threadjacking is frowned on (as mentioned in the terms use which you can read by clicking the link to the right on this page) is for the most part a practical one:
By starting your own thread your problem can get individual attention, focussed on your particular set of circumstances.
By joining somebody else's thread it becomes tricky to answer more than one question at the same time, and can lead to confusion for both parties.
So if you don't mind the minor inconvenience, please start your own thread (in the correct forum) so we can get to grips with your particular problem! -
Partition external hard drive-what format do I use
I'm trying to partition an external hard drive by following the instructions in the disk utility help and am confused about which "format" to use. My choices are: Mac OS extended (Journaled), Mac OS Extended, Mac OS Extended (case sensitive, journaled), Mac OS Extended (case sensitive), Unix file system and Free space.
I've looked in the forums and in the disk utility for definitions of these terms and am sorry if its there and I just don't see it.
On a different subject is there any opinion as to whether I should create a partition that should or should not be used for startup? What is the difference and which is better?
Thank-you very much,
MargieChoose Mac OS extended (Journaled) unless you have a specific reason to use another format.
(31565) -
I am using Iphoto 11 ver 9.4.3 on mac using oxs 10.8.5 i want to export calendar projects to an external hard drive. my goal is to store them in an external hard drive so it doesn't use up memory on the mac hard drive. is it possible to copy the specific projects without copying the entire library? what is the easiest way to do this? i have tried export and import but it didn't seem to work.
What do you not understand?
You can duplicate the iPhoto library (command - D ) and delete everything except the project and its photos from the copy and move that
Or
However the calendar takes very little space - it is simpy database entries - it is the photos in the calendar that take space - and for most people you would wnat to keep those photos in your library
you can use a photo in 50 calendars and it still is only one photo in your library - as I explained calenders do not exist as such - they are simply database entries telling iPhotop how to display the calendar - they take almost no space at all
LN -
External hard drives - what brand do you use
I'm looking to buy an external hard drive, maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I'm thinking about getting a RAID1 setup. I have a lot of valuable pictures in I-Photo, a lot of music in I-Tunes, and would not be a happy camper if my internal HD fails.
Would you give me some ideas as to the external HD brand/model you use - anybody use a RAID setup for redundancy ?
Thanks,
BobHi Bob, I wouldn't go RAID at all, though Raid1 is pretty good you still have problems with RAID, the whole reason they came up with RAID5, RAID10, etc...
I think two independant drives are better than 2 tied together, and there are many options for backups.
Almost more important than the External Drive itself is the Chipset in the External, Oxford being good & Prolific & others not so.
My Books have had far less than glowing reviews for Macs...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2191614&tstart=0
http://x704.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3219&p=42023&hilit=western+digital#p420 23
http://x704.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2939&p=34120&hilit=western+digital#p3412 0
If you try LaCie then have a few spare Power Supplies on hand.
I'd stay away from Bus Powered drives & 2.5" drives also, here's some choices, I'd go Firewire & drives with a 5 year warranty over 3 year warranty...
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/
Lately I use the Voyager...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10618536�
Also see the last post there for the OP's review.
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