<SOLVED> Best file system for an external hard drive

[wanderer7]

Hello people,

I have a 500 GB external hard drive, which I want to use for backups. Since I'm not the only one in the family who's going to use it, I want to make sure that both Linux Mint and Windows (hopefully, one day there won't be any windows pc left in my house ) can read and write data to the disk. Theoretically, I could make several partitions on the disk: one for linux and others for windows. However, I don't know if it is a good idea to have different file systems on the same disk. Probably, I will encrypt the hard drive as well.

So, what's the best file system for this situation?

[SiKing]

I have the same situation as you.
Assuming the disk will be _only_ for backups, then partition it 50/50 NTFS/ext2.
HTH.

[wanderer7]

Thank you, SiKing.

[wanderer7]

Hmm...I forgot to ask one more question. Will I be able to recover backed up files from another computer running linux? Sometimes, I have file permission problems, like :"you are not the owner of the file, you don't have permission to <and some action here>. Is this associated to certain file systems? (If not, then I'll ask this question in another topic )

[wanderer7]

All right, I marked this as solved. I followed the advice above and created 2 partitions on the external hard drive with 2 different file systems: 1 in NTFS and 1 in ext4. I chose ext4 instead of ext2, because ext2 is too old and without journaling. My last question about file permissions doesn't belong here, later I'll make another topic for it.

[SiKing]

I chose ext4 instead of ext2, because ext2 is too old and without journaling.

For backups only, journaling is a waste of space.