best format for a backup hard drive

eggyuk

eggyuk

Member
Vista Pro
I have just repartioned an old ide hard drive which has a very small partition with XP on and i now have a large partition on the drive that i want to use as a back up drive. What format is the best for backup? I have heard that FAT32 is good and it also means it can be read by OSX if the need ever arose (could be useful because my flat mate is a mac user).

Any suggestions?
 

My Computer

System One

  • CPU
    AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800
    Motherboard
    ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
    Memory
    4GB OCZ PC-6400
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire HD4850 Toxic Edition
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Samsung SM2493HW
    Hard Drives
    500GB Seagate, 160GB Seagate
    PSU
    Corsair HX520W
    Case
    Antec P182 Gunmetal Grey
NTFS is best for large drives. You can also assign user rights to it. FAT32 would use large sectors and not efficient.
 

My Computer

System One

  • CPU
    pair of Intel E5430 quad core 2.66 GHz Xeons
    Motherboard
    Supermicro X7DWA-N server board
    Memory
    16GB DDR667
    Graphics Card(s)
    eVGA 8800 GTS 640 MB video card
    Hard Drives
    SAS RAID
NTFS is the best format, all the windows operating system later to XP can only recognize this format. Moreover as Guru has said it is best for the said reason.
 

My Computer

System One

You can still use FAT, FAT32 or NTFS on XP to Vista. Floppies are FAT. Smaller drive can use FAT32. It is not secure because you lose NTFS security. NTFS can format 512 byte sectors for most efficient use of the drive.
 

My Computer

System One

  • CPU
    pair of Intel E5430 quad core 2.66 GHz Xeons
    Motherboard
    Supermicro X7DWA-N server board
    Memory
    16GB DDR667
    Graphics Card(s)
    eVGA 8800 GTS 640 MB video card
    Hard Drives
    SAS RAID
OK. Thank you for the (very prompt) advice. I will bear it in mind. I have just spent the last 3 hours putting XP back on and getting it just how i want it so i cant be bothered doing anything else tonight. I job for tomorrow i think.
 

My Computer

System One

  • CPU
    AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800
    Motherboard
    ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
    Memory
    4GB OCZ PC-6400
    Graphics Card(s)
    Sapphire HD4850 Toxic Edition
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Samsung SM2493HW
    Hard Drives
    500GB Seagate, 160GB Seagate
    PSU
    Corsair HX520W
    Case
    Antec P182 Gunmetal Grey
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