back up system &format ext3 to ext4 and load backup?

[leo5111]

what im saying is can i do backup of my system which is ext3 format drive to ext4 and load backup back onto the disk which will be ext4 or does that not work??

[hysteresis]

You could try this:

http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-upgrad ... 2009/04/21

[leo5111]

is mint 7 9.04?, also in mint backup in hidden files if i select the files it backs them up as well?

[leo5111]

would this work? install mint 7 with ext 4 file format then after it updates run mint backup and load my backup image from my system when i was on ext3? does mint backup , backup files or does it do a backup that if i restore from it it will restore the ext3 filesystem? thanks

[leo5111]

anyone? i used mint backup would formatting to ext4 installing mint 7 then using my mint backup bring back all my apps and settings? if it will how do i format to ext4, then run installer and tell installer not to format to ext3 because i dont think theres a option to install as ext4 in the mint installer is there??...

[DrHu]

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=30442

Actually you can have ext3 and ext4 running together with a later kernel version..
http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/F ... ng_ext4.3F

• Can I mount existing Ext3 as Ext4? And vice versa? Similarly from Ext2 to Ext4 and its reverse?
  
  With recent versions of ext4 (2.6.29 and later), you can mount any ext2 or ext3 filesystem as ext4 without any changes. You must use tune2fs to enable the new ext4 features:
  
  # tune2fs -O extents /dev/DEV
  # tune2fs -O uninit_bg /dev/DEV
  # e2fsck -f /dev/DEV

http://www.h-online.com/open/The-Ext4-L ... res/113403

• The kernel development team adopted the Ext4 code in version 2.6.19 to give it the opportunity to come to maturity in the kernel. Ext4 was marked as experimental in versions up to and including 2.6.27, but since Linux 2.6.28 the new file system is now considered stable. Not that this rules out the odd bug or other unpleasant surprise. The latest Ubuntu 9.04 can already be installed on Ext4 and the forthcoming Fedora 11 release will use Ext4 as its default file system.

Of course Linux mint uses kernel 2.6.28.11..onwards..

[emorrp1]

please don't make multiple threads, as it splits effort. For anyone else, the alternative thread has some answers too: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=30443

As this thread seems to be slightly different, I'll answer here too: I did exactly this. My data was on an ext3 partition, which I shrunk to size, created a new ext4 partition, then copied all the files over from the ext3 to the new ext4. It worked fine, but took ages. It's technically possible to do this with system files too, but I recommend taking a backup of the list of installed packages with dpkg --getselections and doing a fresh install (selecting ext4 as the format), then applying them again afterwards. You're much less likely to run into problems this way.