[LAPTOP] exfat thumb drives--should I format them?

[DoYouKubuntu]

I bought two, 1TB thumb drives last week; when I plugged one in to my old laptop (running 19.10) it immediately spit out 'could not mount device.' I then stuck it in my new laptop (20.04) and it immediately recognized it and opened just fine; I was able to copy some test files over just to be sure. But before I plunge in and actually start using them for backups, I'm wondering if there's any reason to, or not to, format them as ext4, or even something else. ext4 is what I use for all my computers, so it kind of makes sense, but I don't know. Thoughts?

[claydoh]

Up to you. exfat is more or less fat32 for large drives, so no permissions etc. If you never ever ever intend to use them on other computers, say to share files with someone, then format as you wish.

The reason for your drive not working on 19.10 is that there, you need to install exfat-utils to read/write/create exfat. In 20.04 exfat is newly supported in the kernel, though you still need to install the utils to format with it (iirc)

[DoYouKubuntu]

Okay, thanks @claydoh. I think I'll just leave them as is. I tested to make sure case-sensitivity was obeyed, so there's really no other reason [I can think of] to format them.

[jlittle]

The suitability of exfat depends on whether you'd ever want to use them with a Windows computer, but also on how you want to do backups.

If you don't want to get into btrfs, IMO some rsync based method is best to make backups quick and frequent, and with FAT-based (fatty?) file systems, rsync has gotchas.

[DoYouKubuntu]

When I say backups, I mean straight copying files/directories, not actually using any type of backup program. So my backup drives have traditionally just been unplugged from one computer, moved to its replacement, and ready to go! I'm in sort of a transition period now, with old and new technology throwing monkey wrenches in the mix, but it'll all work out.

And, no, nothing of mine will ever touch anything running windows. Everyone I know uses *nix--even when they're not aware of it! Like [some] Mac, Chromebook and Android users.

[DoYouKubuntu]

You know, in retrospect, I wish I had paid System76 to fix the Kudu... *sigh*

But I didn't, because silly pride kept me from letting someone other than me work on my computers. Thirty-five years is a long time to be your own support person! So now I have a brand-new Gazelle, which--when it's running right and I'm not mucking things up--is wonderful! But when it's not...

I attempted to follow @claydoh's advice in this old(er) thread about naming external drives, only with one of my two new 1TB thumb drives, not the external hard drives we were discussing at the time. They arrived formatted as exfat, and although I definitely tested them for case sensitivity upon arrival, today as I started copying data over they were not obeying case sensitivity. After I swore at it, I grabbed the same five files I had originally tested on them, and *now* they don't respect case, but they did before. (No, I promise you, I am not imagining this.)

So I thought, well, okay, then this would be a good time to go ahead and format them to ext4 and name them as described in that other thread. I used KDE Partition Manager, although I normally use gParted, but whatever. I stepped through the process with one of the thumb drives, unmounting it, formatting it as ext4, assigning the label I wanted for it, and so on. After it reported that everything was successfully done, I couldn't mount it. That was grayed out. [Still in partition manager.] So I clicked and viewed and tried to figure out what to do, and got nowhere.

That's pretty much where I am now. I have one new thumb drive that's unusable at the moment--trying gParted didn't help me sort this out--and another that's still usable, but formatted as exfat and not obeying case sensitivity. So it's pretty much useless, too, because I have bazillions of files that it will think are duplicates.

For whatever it's worth, I installed exfat-utils prior to all of this.

Can someone throw me a lifesaver?! Since receiving this new laptop, I've borked it (simply by installing K from a command line), then borked a perfectly good, almost brand new 1TB external hard drive (I still don't know how THAT happened--all I did was unplug it from the Kudu, where it was working fine THAT MOMENT, and plugged it in to the Gazelle, and bam! it was now dead everywhere), and now a borked thumb drive plus one that isn't case sensitive. HELP! Please!