Advice please for external hard drive format?

[Vera]

Hi, I'm expecting my external hard drive to arrive soon. I'm asking if anyone has advice on what formatting I should do? This is my situation:

1. I plan to use external hard drive to store my user data (by which I mean everything under my home directory). It's mainly documents etc.

2. If I had to use the backup, it would be in the event of my data being destroyed, e.g. hard drive failure, etc etc. It's mostly for catastrophic recovery.

3. I do not care about my system files or the OS as much. If I had to, I would simply re-install LinuxLite from live CD, so if there was an issue with the OS itself I don't care as much as I would for my documents.

4. I have 2 LinuxLite machines available to me for recovery (desktop and laptop). However, I would like the drive to ideally be also readable by Windows 10 (in addition to LinuxLite). If that's not possible, then just readable by LinuxLite would be OK.

How do you recommend I format this drive? Would FAT32 work out OK for this, or is it best to use one of the Linux-specific formats? As you can probably tell by my question I know nothing about this topic, which is why I'm asking. I just want to make sure my backup strategy is a good fit for my needs if I need to recover data from it. Thanks for any help you can give.

[supergamer]

This is actually a really difficult decision and I hope I can give some pointers to at least help in your decision. Fat32 has a file size limit of 4gb. If that works and you will have no files larger than 4gb then you can use that. Most external hard drives use NTFS which supports large files over 4gb and Linux should not have an issue writing to that. I have 3 500gb WD Passports that are all NTFS and do not have an issue writing to them. If you are ever planning on using a Windows machine to access that drive, I would stay away from the Linux formats. There is really no way for anyone to say with absolute clarity which format is the best for another person. For me just using the default format on the drive is fine and deleting any of the additional files and folders on there that come with the drive just to clean it.

[gold_finger]

Ditto what supergamer just said -- Linux won't have a problem with either FAT32 or NTFS;  Windows will have a problem if you use a Linux format like ext4, ext3, etc.  And just to clarify in case you misunderstood supergamer, the 4GB limit for FAT32 is per file, not 4GB total of all files.

[Vera]

Thanks [member=6935]supergamer[/member] and [member=16]gold_finger[/member] , this info was incredibly helpful  . I don't have any files over 4G. My biggest ones are around 48M. I will do what supergamer said and use the default format, deleting any files that come with it. Thanks to both of you for your help. 8)