summary
Suppose one is setting up an external drive to be a "write-once archive": one intends to reformat it, copy some files that will (hopefully) never be updated, then set it aside until I need to read something (which could be a long while or never) from the archive from another linux box. I also want to be able to get as much filespace as possible onto the archive; i.e., I want the filesystem to consume as little freespace as possible for its own purposes.
specific question 1: which filesystem would be better for this usecase: ext2, or ext4 without journaling?
Since I've never done the latter before (I usually do this sort of thing with GParted), just to be sure:
specific question 2: is "the way" to install journal-less ext4 mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/whatever
?
general question 3: is there a better filesystem for this usecase? or Something Completely Different?
details
I've got a buncha files from old projects on dead boxes (which will therefore never be updated) saved on various external drives. Collectively size(files) ~= 250 GB. That's too big for DVDs (i.e., would require too many--unless I'm missing something), and I don't have a tape drive. Hence I'm setting up an old USB2 HFS external drive to be their archive. I'd prefer to use a "real Linux" filesystem, but would also prefer a filesystem that
- consumes minimum space on the archive drive (since it's just about barely big enough to hold what I want to put on it.
- will be readable from whatever (presumably Linux) box I'll be using in future.
I had planned to do the following sequence with GParted: [delete old partitions, create single new partition, create ext2 filesystem, relabel]. However, I read here that
recent Linux kernels support a journal-less mode of ext4
which provides benefits not found with ext2
and noted the following text in man mkfs.ext4
"mke2fs -t ext3 -O ^has_journal /dev/hdXX"
will create a filesystem that does not have a journal
So I'd like to know
- Which filesystem would be better for this usecase: ext2, or ext4 without journaling?
- Presuming I go ext4-minus-journal, is the commandline to install it
mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/whatever
? - Is there another, even-better filesystem for this usecase?