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I recently bought a external hard drive to store some data on. I use Linux but I am not a power user. If I format the drive to EXT4, is it possible for the permissions to ever screw up and I lose access to my data? I will be plugging the drive into several different linux based computers at work and I frequently hop distros on my main home machine.

I need to make sure I don't lose any data because I overlooked something. I am not familiar with EXT 3 or 4.

So far I have done this :

  1. Formatted drive to EXT4
  2. ran gksudo thunar and changed the permissions to my user account and all settings to read/write
  3. Wrote all the files I need to the drive

I really appreciate any help.

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You probably won't lose any data, but it will eventually become readable to anyone depending on the command options you provide when mounting the drive.

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  • yeah, that is exactly how I need the data to be read. Able to be accessed on any computer. I am going to clean install a 13.10 distribution soon and the hard drive will act as my only backup until I can get it installed and copy the files back over. What commands should I run to ensure I always have access to this data?
    – EXTdumb
    Oct 29, 2013 at 22:07
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    Just mounting the device with the default options should be enough.
    – David
    Oct 29, 2013 at 22:29
  • Sorry, but why not accept the obviously correct answer?^^
    – David
    Nov 20, 2015 at 0:26

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