Okay, I have a question about the best way to partition/format for multiple backup types. I have a 1TB external USB drive which I would like to use to backup up my Ubuntu internal drive (I will use it to do TAR, and Image backups, as well as Syncing my photo and music folders) and my internal Windows drive using the Image copy function of QuickStart; these are two separate drives within my computer.

My USB drive is a pre-formatted Seagate with NTFS file system configuration. I understand that in order to synchronize Ubuntu folders I cannot use a partition with NTFS because it will screw up the folder permissions and would therefore I would need to create a new partition and format it to one of the Linux file systems (like ext3).

So if I were going to configure this ideally, should I re-format the entire drive to ext3 (or other Linux file systems), or does it make sense to keep an NTFS partition and a separate ext3 partition?

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Unless you will be needing to read or write something to the drive from windows, it will probably be easier to just format it as ext3 (or some other Linux files system.)

Even if someday you need an ntfs filesystem, you can just shrink the ext3 partiton and create an ntfs one.

Thank you talsemgeest. As long as QuickStart can create a full image backup of my Windows drive and restore from an external drive with a Linux file system, I probably won't be needing an NTFS on the drive. Thanks.

I'm in agreement with Talsemgeest, but I admit I like to keep a portion of my backup drive formatted NTFS, just so I can go back and forth easily from Windows if I need to.

mdpalow