External Drive format

My current C drive is formatted NTFS. There is a 39MB partition formatted FAT16. The external hard drive I plan to backup to this morning is WD, 160gb, Fat32. It shipped with some supplier provided software, it desktop google search and Picasa 2.

Do I need to reformat the WD external HD to NTFS? What if I do not but backup the NTFS and FAT16 partitions on my computer harddrive to the WD external leaving it as FAT32?

Bev

 

If you leave it as Fat 32 your backup Image, if larger that 4Gb, will be split into 4Gb pieces. But that's not a problem for True Image to restore. If it was NTFS, the Image will be one file.

 

Bev:

You don't need to reformat the drive. No matter what format you're backing up, the result is a .tib file. A file is just a file and it doesn't matter what kind of file system it's stored on. For example, you can store TI backups on CD in ISO filesystem format, or on Linux PCs in ext2 format, etc. So you don't need to store a backup of an NTFS partition on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. For other reasons, however, you MAY want to reformat your drive to NTFS.

Most external hard drives ship formatted as FAT32 because they will plug in and "just work" with Win98, WinXP, Vista, MAC OS, Linux, etc. That's not to say that FAT32 is the best choice for a file system.

FAT32 Advantage:
Compatible with a wide variety of operating systems.

FAT32 Disadvantages:
a. Has a maximum file size limit of 4 GB. If your images are larger than this TI will break them up into multiple 4 GB pieces.
b. Less reliable than NTFS. A momentary power outage during write operations can result in damaged files. The damage may or may not be repairable using chkdsk.

If you only use your external drive on Windows XP computers then you're probably better off reformatting the drive as NTFS.

 

Thanks Down.

Thanks Mark. I gues the sensible thing to do would be to format the EHD to NTFS now before it is ever used. I must tell you that I am uncomfortable working with Disk Management. A reformat will erase the software that shipped with the WD but I was going to add/remove it anyway. I found an article by Microsoft and they recommend formatting EHDs to NTFS. I am assuming that NTFS will be supported by Vista, if I ever update.

Bev

 

Both of those programs are free, if you think you might ever want to use them in future.

 

Bev,
Did you see the responses in your previous thread?
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184443

 

Sorry Grover, I missed your response from yesterday as I got home late. I checked my original post this morning and it was not on the opening page of the Acronis forum so I mistakenly thought there were no responses.

If I backup leaving the EHD as FAT32 and then need to restore, would the restore to my C drive be NTFS or FAT32.

 

The restore will be the same as the file system of the drive you backed up. Fat32-->Fat32, NTFS-->NTFS. If your image is larger than 4GB then TI will break it into 4GB chunks if you leave the external drive as Fat32. 4GB is the max file size for Fat32. If you format it to NTFS you will get one large file.

 

Thanks Tom. What would you do?

 

Thank you Peter. I will do that and then do the backup.

Bev

 

Yes; Vista uses the same version of the NTFS file system (v3.1) as XP.