Suggestion for filesystem for external HDD for Windows + Linux backup

Getting Help
1

I have been looking and I could not find much discussion for this scenario: We have 3 laptops in our household (1 Linux, 2 windows-11) and I was thinking to backup files from these laptop to same restic repo on an external SSD for offline backup. SSD will be stored at friend’s place on other side of the town; and I plan to backup every month or so. I am looking to use same restic repo, as these three devices have lots of duplicated data; probably more than 50-60% files would be duplicates. Hence, it makes sense to leverage restic’s de-duplication capability.

I am looking for practical suggestions for choice of file-system on the external SSD, as it needs to be accessed though both Linux and Windows. External SSD is in USB 3.2 enclosure. I know NTFS would work.. but I keep reading its not stable on linux. Any other suggestion? Or is the whole idea of using same SSD for both OS a bad choice?

2

I use ExFat in similar case (MacOS + GNU/Linux), but I do restic check –read-data every time.

It seems like a ‘lowest common denominator’ when you want built-in kernel support.

2 Likes
3

In addition I want to recommend thinking about investing a small amount for something that gives you a little redundancy. Don’t put all eggs into one basket and, if possible, implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy!

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4

Thanks. Yes, I am implementing 3-2-1 strategy. This would be “one” of the three copies, which will stay offline and offsite.

5

Good idea. I will add restic check to my scripts.