Le lundi 20 Juin 2005 01:51, Scott Gomez a écrit :
> One thing that would surely help many, if they are using Windows XP, is
> to use the recommended files system: NTFS. It's far more robust than any
> of the forms of FAT. 'Tis unfortunate, but there are still a fair number
> of vendors out there shipping XP systems formatted using the FAT file
> system. It's their convenience, not the well-being of the end-user that
> they have in mind. I'd suggest anyone that isn't certain of the file
> system in use check to be sure they're using NTFS not FAT.
While I mostly agree with you, readers must be warned that NTFS can be *very*
picky to deal with under unfortunate circumstances. NTFS is faster to locate
a file, less subject to corruption, doesn't fragment as much as FAT, and is
more savy on cluster size, *BUT* any corruption can lead very promptly to an
unreadable whole disk, due to the load balanced tree structure of the thing
(for non computer fans, imagine that the way to find a picture on the disk is
following a path on a tree begining at the bottom and going from there to
leafs with a choice at each branch on the way ; if a large branch is "cut",
all leafs are lost for this side - this tree structure isn't related to the
c:\directory\subdir\file logical structure).
While FAT has a long record track of problems, it's much more easy to do data
recovery on it than on NTFS ; been there, done that 2 weeks ago on my
mother's computer, and it is a real real real mess. Even the recovery console
of XP was lost and didn't let me in, so I had to use a Linux Knoppix disk,
and it requires *an awful lot of tweaking* to simply *copy* a file. Note :
I've got a 10 years experience of day to day use of linux, and much more on
Microsoft systems, since DOS 3.0 ; so when I say it's a mess, I really mean
it. I can't remeber having been that much challenged by a computer since CP/M
68K days ;-)
Don't forget also that FAT, while slower in "search for a file mode" delivers
big chunks faster than NTFS, if not fragmented ; if you do video editing,
that can be a concern.
And, please, don't ever ever ever turn encryption on on W2K or XP Pro, unless
you work for the MoD ; whatever happens to your account will render the whole
thing unreadable forever, even if you recreate the same account under the
same name and the same password.
Mandatory Olympus related sentence : one of the reason I came back from
digital to film, thus exhumating my OM-1, is the thought I had that I
couldn't afford a backup system secure and flexible enough to be reasonably
sure that my grand children (if I happen to have some in the future) will see
my pictures just like I do when I pay a visit to my grand mother.
--
Manuel Viet
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