Andrew, I have been following this thread with some interest because I am considering getting an external HD to use to backup important material from my lap top. My current method of using CDs is time consuming and does not get done as often as it should. However when I got my laptop I was surprised to find that they had formatted my C partition as Fat 32 and D (on which I store all my data) as NTFS. Do you think that it matters in my case how the external drive is formatted - FAt32 or NTFS. The possibility of loss of data would rather defeat the object of the backup. Douglas On 27 Mar 2005 at 20:28, Andrew Hodgson wrote: > Hi, > > This is a weird one since I have many drives on different file systems all > over the place and have never had a problem. NTFS is slightly more tricky > to recover from on a disk crash, especially on a portible drive, whereas I > want my primary internal disks to be running with NTFS. There is also not > much advantage in NTFS for smaller drives, especially the flash media - > FAT32 starts becoming really inefficient over 10GB. I also do repairs on > older machines running Windows 98, and (shudder) even Windows 95, Windows > 98 can readFAT32 but not NTFS. > > I will look into this a bit as I want to see if there is any opinion on > it, and Maxtor's reasoning behind the statement made in the user guide. > > Thanks. > Andrew. > -- Douglas Harrison ** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe] ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq] ** or send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq