Assuming that you have NOTHING on the drive that you care about, I would remove the factory partitioning and create a new GPT table with parted. Then, format that as ext4. On Sep 3, 2015 3:17 PM, "Mike Miller" <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > How to format? > > I have a couple of Linux boxes that I would like to regularly backup to a > 5 TB external drive. It seems like it would be a good idea to format that > drive with ext4. Can I just do that with gparted? The drive comes with > NTFS format. Are there any issues I should know about? > > > Which directories to back up? > > What really needs to be backed up? I guess if the system totally failed > I'd install Linux (Ubuntu) again. Of course /home is needed, but > /usr/local and /opt often have programs I've installed and /etc will have a > bunch of settings. I guess /var can have some important stuff. Are > crontabs stored in /var? > > > Which software to use for backup? > > I guess I want only to have in backup what is on the originating drive. So > if I have deleted a file, I want it to be deleted on the backup drive, > too. I assume rsync can do this. Would this be correct?: > > rsync -av --update --delete /home /usr/local /etc /var /opt /media/me/back > > > TIA! > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20150904/8c7a1c57/attachment.html>