Partitioning a Backup Disk?

[Mantazz]

I recently purchased a 3TB external drive that I plan to connect to my FBSD server, to use for backing up data from the server and other systems on the network. I seek advice on a few things:

First, is it advantageous to split it in to more than one partition? I'm leaning towards no, but I may be overlooking something. This would be only for backing up actual data, not software, system configuration, etc.

Second, what file system would be most useful for this, with specific attention paid towards maximum flexibility regarding the OS for a system that I may want to recover files to? In other words, while this system is running FBSD (8.1-Release), I may in the future need to connect it to a Linux or Mac OS (or even - though hopefully not - Windows) system to recover the files. I'm thinking ZFS might be a good choice for this situation, but I welcome input on the matter.

[J65nko]

The question is can Linux, Mac OS or Windows read from ZFS filesystems?
I would suggest to use the Linux ext2fs filesystem.

[Mantazz]

Originally Posted by J65nko

The question is can Linux, Mac OS or Windows read from ZFS filesystems?
I would suggest to use the Linux ext2fs filesystem.

Thank you for the reply. I'm pretty sure of ZFS support for Linux. I looked further in to it for Mac OS X and it turns out they don't have ZFS support yet.

As for Windows, some claim you can use Dokan (
http://dokan-dev.net/en/) to read ZFS drives, and that is all I would need a Windows box to do if it was connected directly. I plan to backup to the drive over the network, hence the BSD box would normally be the only system writing to it directly.

I was considering ext2 as a fallback, thank you for the suggestion. I just figured there might be something newer that would be better suited to the job.