I am not too sure what filesystem I use on my external hard drive, nor how to find out. I know I initially bought a seagate, which my VL system won't recognize. It just sits here, worthless. Thereaftre I bought a Verbatim, and that worked fine out of the box. The only problem with the gsrync root backup is that I have to delete one of the prior backups each time to make sure I have enough room.
Hmm. I have a Seagate external (120GB, 2.5", can't remeber what they call it). Its formatted NTFS, but I have no problems with VL using it. Strange error.
To find out what file system.... One way woud be - mount the drive, open a root terminal. Enter 'mount' and check to see where it is mounted (on my T61 it would be /dev/sdb, but that is because the T61 has a SATA hard drive, so yours may come up differently). Once you know where the drive is mounted, enter 'cfdisk /dev/sdb' (or whatever the device uses). Cfdisk should show the partitions on the drive, and give you an indication as to what file system is in use (for an NTFS drive it will normally show NTFS/HPFS).
I'm fairly sure that you will find it is either FAT32 or NTFS (less likely to be the latter, if you can't use the Seagate external). If I'm right, you have a fairly serious problem with your backups (
I did say this was getting a bit OT, didn't I?).
The problem is that the backups created by Grsync will be uncompressed. And neither FAT32 or NTFS will preserve correct file attributes and permissions for a Linux system. Which will mean that your backups may be completely useless, other than those that are nothing other than data. Things like system settings, any anything else that depends on ownership and correct permission settings will not work.
Maybe we should move this discussion to another part of the forum, but I think it could be important for you to find out just what the file system is and make sure that your backups are usable should you ever have to restore from them.
Paul.
