Acronis 8 - NFTS or FAT32 External Hard Drive?

I have been successfully using The Secure Zone for backups with TI 8. I just bought an external USB 2.0 hard drive (portable 80GB) for backups. When I got home and connected it I discovered the external drive was formatted for FAT32. My computers are NFTS with Windows XP SP2. If I create my images on the external FAT32 drive, when I restore the image back to my computer, will the computer's file system still be NFTS as it was originally? I have searched this forum for info regarding this and I have found both "yes" and "no" answers to this question. I would appreciate Acronis weighing in on this as this question is not answered in the FAQ's for either TI 8 (gone) or TI 9. I appreciate anyone's help out there. Thank you.

 

if u backup an NTFS partition, ATI will restore it as an NTFS partition. and same goes for FAT32.

 

Thank you WSFuser. That makes me feel better.

 

WSFuser is correct, but you could also reformat your external drive to NTFS and take advantage of the advanced features of the NTFS file system. Of course, if you need to use this drive with any Windows 9x or Mac computers, sitck with FAT32.

 

Just be aware of the file size limits of FAT32 ... which is 4GB, so make sure you split your images accordingly. Like already suggested, if you don't have a need for the FAT32 file system (for the reasons mentioned in jmk posts ... I'll add the other possibility of using as a shared writeable drive for Linux/Windows) ... I'd convert it to NTFS.

 

Hello Dog. Thank you for responding. With your statement that each file cannot exceed 4GB in size, I backed up my computer image to my FAT32 external drive. The total image size was 11GB with medium compression. I assume that the Acronis True Image 8 software would automatically break up any file larger than 4GB - and the backup would go smoothly even if there were files larger than 4GB, to the external FAT32 drive?? I understand that backing up to NFTS file systems is more advantageous, but given that the above is true, my external backup to my FAT32 drive is viable even with large files given the TI 8 software, and should provide a smooth restore. I appreciate your thoughts.