formatting iomega zip on linux

formatting iomega zip on linux

[Chris Conn]

I dug out my old 100MB PP Iomega Zip drive and hooked
it up to my Slackware box because I have a new digital
camera and I want to backup some of my pictures on zip.

But now that I'm using reiserfs I'm wondering how I
should format the filesystem on it, should I leave it
at ext2? Does it matter?

Thanks as always,




=====
Chris Conn   
cmcgoat@swbell.net   http://storm.cadcam.iupui.edu/~cmcgoat
Austin, TX

Re: formatting iomega zip on linux

[David Masover]

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It sort of depends on your goals.

If you want anyone to be able to read it, format it as vfat.  That way,
it will (probably) be readable by a Windows machine.  (I could be wrong
about this -- see how Windows formats a zip disk.)

If you want to make it easy to change later, I'd use reiser4 or xfs,
because you want it packed intelligently, and you might want the
flexibility to move things around and change your mind about what you
want on the device before you unmount it.

If you just want simple backup, in the same way that you'd want it if
you just burned some (non-rewritable) CDs, you probably want to use a
raw tar, and add some gzip/bzip2 compression if the drive doesn't do it
for you.  That compression probably won't matter anyway if it's just
pictures, though.

But really, what you want is a cdrw drive and ISO or UDF, depending on
whether you want to rewrite it or not.  The discs are cheaper, and the
filesystems are both universal and reasonably efficient.  And a .tar.bz2
probably won't help much anyway.
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