I would like to write a simple backup script that saves some data to a FAT drive. Should I reformat the drive and use a better file system or is it possible to use rsync with FAT? If so, what problems might I run into? Would performance be a lot worse?
EDIT:
This is on linux, didn't even know there was a rsync for windows. The sources are various file systems (it's a mess), and the destination is currently formatted with FAT32.
Thank you for your answers, I'll probably go for a reformat, since I'm not completely sure about the file sizes we'll have.
Best Answer
I would recommend reformatting to a linux fs if you possibly can. As mentioned, FAT has relatively low file size limits and might not handle permissions and ownership quite right. More importantly, FAT doesn't track modification times on files as precisely as, say ext3 (FAT is only precise to within a 2 second window). This leads to particularly nasty behavior with rsync as it will sometimes decide that the original files is newer or older than the backup file by enough that it needs to re-copy the data or at least re-check the hashes. All in all, it makes for very poor performance on backups. If you must stick with FAT, look into rsync's --size-only and --modify-window flags as workarounds.