<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 6:27 PM, J <<a href="mailto:dreadpiratejeff@gmail.com">dreadpiratejeff@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 18:58, M. Milanuk <<a href="mailto:memilanuk@gmail.com">memilanuk@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > Wow. Someone is apparently off their meds... Probably a good reason why he's "A former tech" ;-) To answer the OPs questions though, Question 1: If you are going to use that disk at all on a non-Linux system (e.g. Windows) you can not format it using any of the Linux filesystems. If you have ANY need or desire to use that disk between both windows and linux systems, you need to either partition it to create a windows partition (NTFS) and a Linux partition (ext2, ext3 or ext4), or you need to just keep the whole thing formatted as NTFS: the modern NTFS support in Linux is pretty good, definitely not like the old days where writing to an NTFS partition could corrupt the entire partition or worse ;-) Question 2: If you repartition and reformat, then yes, you'll lose all that stuff... but then again, do you even really need it? Are you HONESTLY going to use it, or just worried about keeping it around because you MIGHT need it some day? There are plenty of other cross-platform encryption tools out there (TrueCrypt being my current favorite). As for backup, why can't you use the disk as it is? I have a 500GB disk (NTFS formatted) that I use between one of my linux boxes and my wifes XP box. Her automated backup software (whatever it was that came with the disk) backs up her stuff into one directory, and my rsync script backs up my stuff into a different directory. All works well, no problems. -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div> Hello, Thanks for a good advice. I was extremely nervous when I received earlier angry and impolite answer from someone. I just wanted to know something and ask the community. Perhaps my question wasn't that great. Why people use bad words ? I don't know. Mir