NTFS v FAT.32

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by donford, Aug 10, 2009.

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  1. donford

    donford Registered Member

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    I am using ATI2009 Home, Build 9796

    A question prompted by a comment in an earlier thread.

    My ‘C’ drive is NTFS and I have a clone of this on an external drive made when I first used Acronis a few weeks ago. On a second external drive ‘D’ I have ‘My backup (1), ‘My Backup (2) and ‘My Backup (3), the drive with these backups is formatted as FAT.32. All the files from the backups show as do various configuration files of the drive itself.

    So my question is: Should the external drive ‘D’ be reformatted as NTFS and the backups redone or will in the case of a recovery being required Acronis be able to handle the fact that the ‘C’ drive and ‘D’ drive are different formats?
     
  2. Wandering2

    Wandering2 Registered Member

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    Fat32 drives are limited to 4 GB file size, so Acronis has to split the file to fit on them. Acronis can recover from either. It both automatically splits, and then during recover recognizes the set and reconstructs from it. It's better to format the external drive to NTFS if you are not planning to share it with a Mac.
     
  3. Green Giant

    Green Giant Registered Member

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    Thank you for your posting, Wandering2!

    I installed a Western Digital external drive (1TB) using FAT 32, on Saturday August 8 to use Paragon System Backup RC1. My main hard drive is in NTFS.

    Having received no error messages, I assume that the Paragon product will behave like Acronis, should I need to restore from my weekly backup.
     
  4. DwnNdrty

    DwnNdrty Registered Member

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    Here's another comparison of Fat32 vs NTFS that might make you want to switch to NTFS. It is all to do with cluster size.

    A 1Tb drive with Fat32 is using a 32kb cluster size while an NTFS drive will use a 4kb cluster size. If you have a file that is 3kb, as an example, it will occupy one cluster but on the Fat32 drive, 29k is wasted - it cannot be used by another file. Whereas on the Ntfs drive only 1k is wasted. So you see the amount of wasted space on the Fat32 drive will be more and will grow at a faster rate than on the Ntfs drive.
     
  5. Green Giant

    Green Giant Registered Member

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    Thanks for the info DwnNdrty!

    At the moment, just having started to use the external drive for backups in case of disaster, I have plenty of space. I know that there is an MS program to convert this external drive to NTFS, so may do this in the future.
     
  6. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    You are better off to convert to NTFS by re-formatting now while you likely can easily copy off the existing info and then copy it back after the format.

    Yes, MS does have the CONVERT routine but it creates 512 byte clusters not the 4096 byte clusters which are preferred. It is possible to change the 512 byte to 4096 byte clusters after conversion with a partitioning program but why not do it now when there is less chance for a screw-up?
     
  7. donford

    donford Registered Member

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    Many thanks for the advice.

    I have formatted the external drive as NTFS and done a new backup to that.
     
  8. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Good choice. FAT32 also suffers from reliability issues. NTFS is more robust.
     
  9. Green Giant

    Green Giant Registered Member

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    Glad to report that the volume label I needed to run convert.exe (to change my Western Digital 1TB external drive from FAT32 to NTFS), was the word 'Elements'. Convert.exe has run and all appears to be well.
     
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