I have some photographs on my Centos 4 server that I want to copy to a USB drive. However, I want to be able to access the files from Windows or Mac OS's. Where should I look for instructions on how to mount and format the USB drive and is FAT32 the only option?
Many thanks
On 3/9/2011 4:56 PM, Todd Cary wrote:
I have some photographs on my Centos 4 server that I want to copy to a USB drive. However, I want to be able to access the files from Windows or Mac OS's. Where should I look for instructions on how to mount and format the USB drive and is FAT32 the only option?
After plugging it in, use 'dmesg' to see the device name that was just added and mount it wherever you want. Maybe you should think about switching to Centos 5 (or 6 soon...) which should automount on the desktop.
Fat32 is the only thing that will 'just work' across the different OS's and it is OK unless you are handling files >4GB. But don't you have a network for that sort of thing?
Les -
A lot of the data needs to be moved in time to servers in other organizations (e.g. Rotary) or the data may be used as a repository for someone with just a notebook computer who would plug the HD into the computer. This is not my main data backup; I use rsync for that. http://www.toddcary.com/rotary/ is one example of data that needs to be shared.
Can rsync take ext4 data and copy it to a fat32 drive?
Todd
On 3/9/2011 3:16 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On 3/9/2011 4:56 PM, Todd Cary wrote:
I have some photographs on my Centos 4 server that I want to copy to a USB drive. However, I want to be able to access the files from Windows or Mac OS's. Where should I look for instructions on how to mount and format the USB drive and is FAT32 the only option?
After plugging it in, use 'dmesg' to see the device name that was just added and mount it wherever you want. Maybe you should think about switching to Centos 5 (or 6 soon...) which should automount on the desktop.
Fat32 is the only thing that will 'just work' across the different OS's and it is OK unless you are handling files>4GB. But don't you have a network for that sort of thing?
On 3/9/2011 5:51 PM, Todd Cary wrote:
A lot of the data needs to be moved in time to servers in other organizations (e.g. Rotary) or the data may be used as a repository for someone with just a notebook computer who would plug the HD into the computer. This is not my main data backup; I use rsync for that. http://www.toddcary.com/rotary/ is one example of data that needs to be shared.
Can rsync take ext4 data and copy it to a fat32 drive?
Sure, it will copy the files, but you'll lose the attributes (owner, ctime, etc.) that fat32 doesn't store. If you need that, you could write tar archives up to the 4gb size limit. But, unless you need to work with non-networked computers, I'd just rsync to some common network location that also exported via samba.
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Todd Cary todd@aristesoftware.com wrote:
Les -
A lot of the data needs to be moved in time to servers in other organizations (e.g. Rotary) or the data may be used as a repository for someone with just a notebook computer who would plug the HD into the computer. This is not my main data backup; I use rsync for that. http://www.toddcary.com/rotary/ is one example of data that needs to be shared.
Can rsync take ext4 data and copy it to a fat32 drive?
Yes, but you have to give up permissions and the modify time on a FAT32 is only accurate to 2 seconds. To rsync from an ext3/4 directory to a plugged-in USB drive use something like:
rsync -av --no-p --modify-window=1 <srcdir>/ /media/<volname>/<targetdir>/
and you might need --delete.
More info at man rsync.
Another possibility: always use tar, and put something like a Windows version of 7zip executable on the USB drive as well as the data. That way, Windows users can get the files out the tar archive.
--On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 2:56 PM -0800 Todd Cary todd@aristesoftware.com wrote:
I have some photographs on my Centos 4 server that I want to copy to a USB drive. However, I want to be able to access the files from Windows or Mac OS's. Where should I look for instructions on how to mount and format the USB drive and is FAT32 the only option?
I don't know about Mac, but you could set up NTFS with Fuse on CentOS to allow you to format and mount it as an NTFS filesystem.
You could also format as ext3 and install a filesystem driver on Windows to understand ext3.
Since the Mac is BSD-based, it might even understand ext3. There's this project:
http://ext2fsx.sourceforge.net/
I haven't used these, as I haven't needed to export files to another OS this way.
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Dale Dellutri -
John R Pierce -
Kenneth Porter -
Les Mikesell -
Todd Cary