Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jmhill @Foritus What other options are there? I was told that flashdrives can lose data if they are unpowered for more than a year and this claim is repeated often on the internet

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@demize This look stable? https://openzfsonwindows.org/

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@porglezomp smartctl would probably tell you that the drive has a bunch of bad blocks, which would result in the drive essentially locking up doing retries on access.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Okay but seriously: Should I NTFS? People are saying the Linux NTFS driver is "pretty good" "perfectly adequate" is "adequate" what I'm looking for with my backup HD

https://toot.dusepo.co.uk/@Foritus/116155362354958361

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @Foritus is this a serious suggestion?

In what way would it be better than NTFS straight?

Why not bcachefs on exfat?

[lambdageek@mastodon.social]

@elladan @mcc Seems like this should work if you have a version of windows that supports WSL2 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk

the instructions are kind of convoluted bu t toward the end they mention that once it's mounted in a WSL Linux distro, you can then also attach it to windows explorer.

[finagle@hachyderm.io]

@mcc Install a Linux file server on the disk serving itself

[lambdageek@mastodon.social]

@elladan @mcc I'm amused that to find the disk id, you apparently have to issue a SQL statement to some obscure subsystem of windows. typical

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@mcc @Foritus nah I'm just joshing about a much-worse-case setup. Especially considering that Mr. Bcachefs is a vibe coder.

[solardavy@climatejustice.social]

@mcc I think exFAT is a safe bet.

Alternatively, there been a big push in Linux kernel to get a proper NTFS driver (was called ntfsplus untill recently).

Similarly there's quite good support for btrfs on Windows.

But yeah, exFAT is closest to what would work now and has a chance to continue working.

[demize@unstable.systems]

@mcc oh that looks much better than the other ones I’ve seen, yeah

still has a “this is beta” bit in the… poetry? in the github readme? but a quick look says I’d be comfortable enough with it for most things

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@demize oh. beta D:

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@lambdageek @elladan Hm that's interesting, but I use WSL1 (because WSL2 has terrible performance when accessing the windows partitions) and the first thing I plan to do with this drive is move a whole lot of files off my Win 10 extended support machine. So although I guess I only do that once, whatever I do the exfiltration from would ideally be adequate perf when addressing both the NTFS drive (from) and the external drive (to)

[demize@unstable.systems]

@mcc yeah

but it looks active, they seem responsive to issues, and a quick check of the issues doesn’t flag any obvious “this will destroy all your data”

most of the other ones I’ve seen have practically said “this will destroy your data”

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@jmhill @Foritus @mcc The average spinning drive retains data quite a while longer than any other commonly-available writable medium does. SSDs come close, but they’re not quite to the same level as hard drives. For most backup purposes, the right answer is to just trust the media.

If your backups are sensitive enough that spinning drives are untrustworthy long-term, then they’re also untrustworthy short-term, and you need to use something like ZFS with ongoing data integrity checks.

[nabijaczleweli@101010.pl]

@mcc i'm surprised to see that sid no longer marks all NTFS drivers as broken and in fact ships a ntfs3.ko, but even the FUSE ntfs-3g implementation has been generally understood as good enough at least for reading for a long time, and windows unfortunately forces your hand here

[makiki@bark.lgbt]

@mcc It won't explode the filesystem if that's what's you are worried about - and you don't really have any better option for a filesystem accessible directly from both windows and linux (exFAT will explode on the first unlucky powerfail you'll get).

[urja@social.treehouse.systems]

@mcc

I suppose NTFS will work.

(Personally I'm so old hat and linux-focused that i'd use ext4 and there's software out there that can copy files out of ext4 partitions on windows in a pinch...)

But also for a fun suggestion that I'm not sure I'd be serious about (have not tested it myself), but ... WinBTRFS is a thing, so if you want a super modern filesystem, there you go (i'm still scared of btrfs).

(ReactOS folks have booted their whole OS off of btrfs i hear.. that's wild.)

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@mcc @jmhill @Foritus While SSDs can lose data when unpowered, that’s more of a boogeyman than a real problem. It’s like cell wear. Problems can be induced under extreme conditions. As long as you stick to the brands which make their own flash, SSDs practically never die from wear, and they almost never lose data even going without power for years.

[mega@chaos.social]

@mcc ntfs-3g Is pretty good. I've even used some of their additional tooling to rescue data from a dead disk (had lots of dead blocks)