On Sun, 1 Nov 2020 at 22:55, Mick Ab <recoverymail123...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My plan is to update my distribution very soon, but first I need to do > a backup of the system to a USB portable hard drive (which uses NTFS). Hi Mick, Forgive me if I am wrong, but it seems possible that there could be some "XY Problem" occurring here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem I'm unable to know from your message history what you know already, or not, what your knowledge level is, so I am writing this on the chance that it might be useful to you. If that's not correct, then please ignore. Are you aware that NTFS is not an optimal filesystem to use on Linux systems? If I had a USB portable hard drive that I was going to use only with Linux systems, then I would get rid of its NTFS filesystem at the earliest opportunity, unless it was already being used for other purposes. If the drive is blank, you don't have to use the factory-format NTFS, you can change it to something better before using it. I only use NTFS in situations where another non-Linux system needs to be able to read the same files. What triggered me to write this message is that it seems unlikely that a non-Linux system would need to be able to read the system backup you mentioned above. If your goal is system backup and that is something that you have never done before, then I suggest that if you state the big-picture goal of your situation: - what resources you have. - what your goal is. - what research you have already done. - what you know and what you don't know. then you might receive more useful advice from us, if you want that. There's many different ways to do a system backup. But none that I can think of that involve NTFS, unless there's a good reason or factors that you haven't yet shared with us :) But if you don't need to be told this, that's fine too.
