I'm wiping a drive that I may later use as the destination for cloning another drive. It currently uses an ext3/ext4 filesystem, and I'm wondering whether there are any Linux-specific precautions before formatting it. If I won't need to access the drive from Windows or another operating system, is ext4 the better choice than exFAT?
3 Answers
After formatting, make sure the filesystem has the ownership and permissions you want. A newly created filesystem may be owned by root, so you might need to use chown or chmod before your regular user can work with the files. Some graphical disk tools also provide a “take ownership” option that handles this for you.
exFAT is convenient for removable drives because Windows and Linux can both read it, but it doesn’t provide journaling and offers fewer recovery and data-integrity features than ext4. ext4 is designed for Linux and is the better fit for a drive that will stay connected to a Linux system. Whichever filesystem you use, unmount the drive properly before disconnecting it, especially if data may still be writing.
The biggest danger is selecting the wrong device. Drive names and numbering can change between boots or hardware changes, so double-check the device carefully before formatting. Once the filesystem is created, mounting by UUID is more reliable than depending on names like /dev/sda. If the drive will only be used with Linux, ext4 is generally the sensible choice; exFAT is mainly useful for compatibility with other operating systems.
I’ve confirmed I’m working with the correct drive. Since I don’t expect to use it with another operating system, I’ll stick with ext4.