external hard drives- corruption - efat vs ntfs

[christopher2222]

So lets say you are archiving a lot of discs to an external drive. It might be wise, if you are using windows, to have the drive formatted to NTFS.
My reason for that is, less possibility of corruption.

I had a power outage and now my external drive ExFAT is now dirty because I was writing to it at the time of the outage, so I have to back it ALLL up and reformat it. I also decided to check another couple of external drives that were connected on idle with chkdsk and it also reports many files being corrupt (silent swearing occurring) now it may be false and I checked the videos and they seemed ok. I guess I'll have to watch the whole thing to be sure, but a number of files have been reported corrupt. I'll have log the files that were reported corrupt and start my process all over again. Just worried if I run a chkdsk /f that after it fixes the files they are unreadable. Anyone have experience with this? Or does everyone just use NTFS?

I recall reading somewhere if you are only using a windows system to just format as NTFS. If saving your data is important it is probably wise to make that choice.

[Coopervid]

So lets say you are archiving a lot of discs to an external drive. It might be wise, if you are using windows, to have the drive formatted to NTFS.
My reason for that is, less possibility of corruption.

I had a power outage and now my external drive ExFAT is now dirty because I was writing to it at the time of the outage, so I have to back it ALLL up and reformat it. I also decided to check another couple of external drives that were connected on idle with chkdsk and it also reports many files being corrupt (silent swearing occurring) now it may be false and I checked the videos and they seemed ok. I guess I'll have to watch the whole thing to be sure, but a number of files have been reported corrupt. I'll have log the files that were reported corrupt and start my process all over again. Just worried if I run a chkdsk /f that after it fixes the files they are unreadable. Anyone have experience with this? Or does everyone just use NTFS?

I recall reading somewhere if you are only using a windows system to just format as NTFS. If saving your data is important it is probably wise to make that choice.

That's known for many years that NTFS is much more robust than (Ex)- FAT. I don't even think about formatting anything else.

[Woodstock]

For Windows systems, it's pretty much a given for any sizable drive. The variations on FAT are for portability of removable devices, especially across operating systems.

NTFS works for Windows and Linux, with readability on MacOS (write ability can be turned on). The variety of FAT partitions kept coming as flash drives got bigger. Mac could have gotten traction with HPFS, but Apple wanted exclusivity.

[flojo]

... I have to back it ALLL up and reformat it.

If the data loss is objective reality, you'll need to run a hash check on the source and destination files. You can boot Ubuntu on a USB disk and run e2fsck. You can also read the data with dd into a file and the mount the file as a loop back device, but you'll need to read up on that.

In the future, you can run par2 across all the files individually and sort of get ZFS type redundancy. I do this with an exFAT NVMe drive that I use for Windows games as 20% parity is cheaper/smaller than backing up the entire game.

If saving your data is important ... make that choice.

The choice of not running Windows? In my opinion, even JBOD is better ran on ext4 as I've lost 99% less data on ext4 than NTFS, ext4's journaling is seemingly just better. There's also XFS v5, but I haven't made my way to that yet, but I've never lost anything on v4 (although I've rarely used it). If you can buy 1 more drive the same size as your largest drive, then you could set up lazy, better-than-nothing ZFS RAIDZ-1 and get some lazy protection (parity is very similar to par2's, but ZFS's parity is built-in and automatic).

[christopher2222]

FYI - Ok apparently for windows7 systems chkdsk reported errors incorrectly on drives larger than 2 Tb
So there was a hotfix for it KB2843376 - which apparently is unavailable, but it seems to be reported as updated in to a security fix windows6.1-KB3063858-64.msu. So I'll give that a go and maybe the chkdsk will show the other drives as ok.