I am doing web development mostly in Ubuntu. Sometimes I need to go into Windows to do other administrative work. Now, I am ignorant about file systems. I cannot tell the difference between NTFS and FAT32. My eyes just glaze over the Wikipedia articles.
All I know is I have been using this 320 GB portable USB harddisk to save files when I am in Ubuntu and when I am in Windows.
Now I got a situation where sometimes the Windows 7 system cannot detect the harddisk. In Ubuntu, I cannot mount the harddisk. I suspect the NTFS data inside is no longer consistent. I believe it has to do with the file system issue. Or my harddisk is coming apart.
How do I make it easy to backup my files in a portable USB harddisk regardless in Ubuntu or Windows?
That would mean I can go from
- from Linux/Ubuntu to a portable harddisk read/write files
- from Windows 7 to a portable harddisk read/write files
the same files.
Update
I realise that the issue is due to bad sectors in the hard disk drive. Now I am trying to recover the files. I want to prevent this from happening again since I still need to use Ubuntu and Windows. And yes, the files can be larger than 4 GB, so FAT32 is out.
By the way, I bought a new hard disk drive.