Linux Format forums

[DavidMcCrossan]

Thanks to Mike it was easy to upgrade from Jaunty, and all is now working well.

Using the part ed I opted for ext4 per Mike's advice but I seemed only to have the option of retaining the existing ext3 for /home or formatting and losing existing work (natch I simply forgot to save all to usb stick). I saved my records as ext3 on /home.

I expect to upgrade 10.4 in due course.
What does the team advise? Should I format /home to ext4 and copy back all my files, or stay as ext3 - which has always worked faultlessly? - and anyway, when I attempt to copy back my files will they simply be saved as ext3, or miraculously as ext4?

Is there any risk?

Many thanks, as ever.

David

[Rhakios]

If you intend to upgrade in the near future, then I'd leave things as they are. It isn't going to make much difference if you have different partitions with different filesystem types.
If you want to switch to ext4 in the future you will need to format your /home partition, which means backing up and restoring. As long as you use a file backup, rather than a filesystem backup tool, when you restore your files, they will not revert the partition to ext3.

Edit: I should mention (before someone else does) that some people still don't seem to like ext4, and although openSUSE defaults to ext4, I have kept all my partitions as ext3, which has served me perfectly well up to now.
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[ollie]

I bit the bullet when I "upgraded" my laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 and did a clean install. I copied my files to an external drive and then put them back on the /home partition. ext4 has not even blinked on my laptop and it has handled small <100bytes to large >15GB files. Early reports that data loss occurred when systems crashed and the "delayed allocation data" wasn't written to disk problem doesn't seem to have been a problem, but laptops don't tend to run out of power and neither do servers.

My desktop system has stayed at 9.04 as I consider moving the data to a RAID 1 setup with a couple of 2TB drives. Teenage daughters know how to chew through money I'll probably wait until the Lynx 10.04 LTS is released at the end of April to do the upgrade now.

[LeeNukes]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_netbook_fs&num=1


I'm still going to stick with EXT3 for a while if given the option.
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[DavidMcCrossan]

Thanks guys for your help and advice.

I will stay out of trouble by remaining with ext3 for the while.

Best

David