Should I use VFAT or ext3 for a 1TB external USB hard drive?

Should I use VFAT or ext3 for a 1TB external USB hard drive? "I have a 1 TB external USB hard drive which I want to use to backup data from my home and office desktops (both running Linux). Should I format the drive (possibly split into a few partitions) as VFAT or ext3?"
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 318

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"Definitely ext3/4 over VFAT.

Ext3/4 are journaling file systems, which means no fragmentation issues.
Read/writes will be significantly faster with Ext.
VFAT has a 4 GB maximum file-size, which can come back to haunt you when you need to store a large file on it after you already have it loaded up with data."

Guest [Entry]

The answer should be NTFS/exFAT if there's need to exchange files with Windows. NTFS supports files larger than 4GB and also has journal like ext3/4. NTFS has long been supported perfectly by Linux. Otherwise ext4 would be recommended.