Hard Drive Backup Software 53

Eli Coten JD

That is a very good question but its a two part answer.

First I buttume your backing up a XP-Win2000-Win2003-NT NTFS filesystem (it is possible to use fat on those OS's) as the FAT-FAT32 filesystems do not and cannot contain security information (read-write-owner-group information) so if you were to format your secondary drive as FAT-FAT32 a copy of the files on the drive would lose there security information. Unless stored in a compressed file format such as rar I think zip also keeps the security information.

Secondly a disk dump from a NTFS filesystem would be an exact copy of the disk (compressed if you piped it through a compression program) so the security bits would not be an issue, but if you copied just the files they would lose there security bits unless you used tar (tape archiver). tar is a widely used program on Linux it can backup any medium to any medium not just tape devices, it works by sticking all the files together and can be used with or without compression, you can also use rar,zip and many other compression programs under Linux.

JD