I wonder, since I have decided to not follow proper advice, that for example ext2 is meant for a usb removable volume, while journalling fs aren't [benchmarking wasn't real slow, but I don't seem to appreciate i-nodes], nor that the operating system says it has finished copying and unmount the device seems impossible/ give a long waiting time, and the hardware blinker on this usb stick I have isn't "lying". That was enough annoyance to drop the whole ext<n> thing for me. Now that I've came to the conclusion that jfs somehow didn't want to be fsck'd at all, I again went with xfs for usb [only this time I attempt to learn about what I can do and do not. Because instead of backing up, restoring is just as important as the backup itself. Now I've learnt that xfs has to be treated well, I saw the following output with the command "mkfs.xfs /dev/sd<n>" --- meta-data=/dev/sdc isize=256 agcount=4, agsize=244928 blks = sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1 = crc=0 finobt=0 data = bsize=4096 blocks=979712, imaxpct=25 = sunit=0 swidth=0 blks naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 ftype=0 log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2 = sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1 realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0 --- I am not only curious but also interested, what xfs is trying to tell me, when I just asked it to create a new xfs. Since I couldn't get jfs to do a simple 'fsck -n', and fat and ntfs are of no importance to me, and that btrfs simply isn't meant that way and on top of that, that ext2 is a bit dated, ext3 isn't clear to me, and ext4 doesn't seem to add much [I find], the only conclusion that I have now, is to stick with xfs, and most of the internet advices otherwise. I wonder if someone on this list can tell me more on the meta-data of xfs, not my bias to xfs while I wasn't able to give jfs a proper chance. It is kind of important for a usb backup to know what could go wrong before anything goes wrong with the data trusted to it. That is why I am asking here, in the hope that a knowledgeable/ experienced person could shed some light on this. [for my main purpose, having a "pre-prepared" disaster recovery plan, instead of just backups]. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html