Help choosing ntfs vs all other filesystems

[ciproxr]

I have an 1tb external hard drive and basicly i plugged it in today and used it but i forget to unount it and just pulled the usb cord out. Some how the partition got corrupted and i couldnt recover it, so now im back to square one.

I lost alot of data but the most important stuff is backed up on another hard drive so im going to be copying that over again.

i want to know which filesystem is more error resistant. I hear ntfs is journaled, does that help ?

Hows exfat for an external HD ? What can i do to prevent this type of partition errors from happening so easily ?

 

[lxskllr]

AFAIK, NTFS is your best bet for Windows. Eject the drive before unplugging to prevent damage.

 

[cl-scott]

NTFS is definitely your best bet within Windows. ExFAT is still essentially FAT, so it's inefficient storage wise and has absolutely none of the methods to try and prevent filesystem corruption that are in NTFS.

There are limits to what any filesystem can do to prevent damage, so there's never a guarantee, but NTFS does something whereas FAT does nothing. If Windows ever natively supports something like say ZFS, then it would be worth revisiting this discussion, but not until there's more choice than FAT and NTFS.

 

[theevilsharpie]

On Windows, your choice is simple: use NTFS.

Fat is incredibly fragile, and is impractical for today's mass-storage because of low max file-size limits.

exFat's fixed fat's file size limits, but doesn't do anything about reliability, and its compatibility is limited. Since the only reason anyone uses fat is for its broad compatibility, exFat is pointless.

 

[Nothinman]

The issue was you pulling the plug, not the filesytem being used. Depending on what was still in cache or what I/Os were still in flight you would have still lost data with NTFS. The only difference would be that the journal would have caused the filesystem itself to stay in a consistent state but that doesn't say anything about your actual data.

 

[Auric]

If write caching is disabled then the data should not be lost when there is no transfer in progress. Even then, the source should not be deleted before it is confirmed written to the target.

 

[imagoon]

NTFS is definitely your best bet within Windows. ExFAT is still essentially FAT, so it's inefficient storage wise and has absolutely none of the methods to try and prevent filesystem corruption that are in NTFS.

There are limits to what any filesystem can do to prevent damage, so there's never a guarantee, but NTFS does something whereas FAT does nothing. If Windows ever natively supports something like say ZFS, then it would be worth revisiting this discussion, but not until there's more choice than FAT and NTFS.

ReFS is essentially ZFS. Since it is on Server 2012, there is high odds that it will be in "Windows 9" if MS follows tradition.

 

[forumuser]

Echoing what everyone else has said, NTFS.

 

[forumuser]

AFAIK, NTFS is your best bet for Windows. Eject the drive before unplugging to prevent damage.

The other thing they could do is possibly disabling write cacheing.