[Scott Dorsey]

anahata wrote:
On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:26:24 -0500, Soundhaspriority wrote:

FAT32 is a fragile file system, not suitable for archiving.

It's perfectly OK for that, as long as you don't hit the file size limit.
What it's not good for is heavy use with lots of concurrent file system
activity as it's prone to fragmentation and not particulay easy to
recover after a crash or power failure.

In fact it's pretty good for archiving _because_ it has pretty low overhead.
Likewise the ISO filesystem is very generic, supported by everything from
the Apple II on up to the latest Linux version, and is great for archiving.
Also totally unacceptable for anything else, but that's what it's for.

FAT32 also has the advantage of wide support as its specification is
freely available.

Agreed. NTFS is a freaking nightmare because it's all undocumented so nobody
but Microsoft has an absolute complete implementation of it. The current
implementation that ships with OSX allows reading only, not writing.

BUT! The good news is that OSX comes with FUSE which allows filesystem
support to be very easily codes, and the ntfs3g package will allow OSX to
easily read and write NT filesystems. It seems to be extremely reliable
but you should know the performance isn't very good. It gets better every
day, but it's still slower than a native filesystem.

Use a
utility program to copy the recordings onnto disks that have journaling
file systems

Journaling FS are specifically for protection against corruption in the
event of an unexpected power failure or crash. For a backup or archive
the journaling functionality is redundant.

The good news is that the redundant data in the journal can make it easier
to recover data from a corrupted filesystem in the archive. The bad news
is that the more sophisticated design of the filesystem can make it more
difficult to figure out how to recover data from a corrupted filesystem
in the archive.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."