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Created Backup Datastore is ext2

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I was poking around my appliance and noticed that the backup storage created by the GUI is formatted as ext2, which of course lacks a journal. Is there a reason for this? Is there an option to create an ext3 or ext4 storage for backups instead? It seems to me that as important as backup storage is, it really should have a journal in case something happens while it is mounted.

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Ben,

The ext2 is the default (historically used) file system format used when you create locally attached storage on virtual disk attached to appliance. In fact appliance will recognize any virtual disk which is formatted in either ext2 or ext3 as locally attached storage, so in practice you can attach the virtual disk to any Linux system, perform format into ext2/ext3 and then attach it to the appliance. The only requirement is that this disk is larger than 10GB.

I've also made a quick test: added a CD-ROM device to appliance, then booted it from Acronis Disk Director .iso and then changed the file system type on the virtual disk from ext2 to ext3 (convert feature). After reboot appliance was able to recognize this new ext3 volume and all old archives which were created there before (I had a couple of archives made while the storage was ext2 formatted).

Thank you.
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Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis Backup for VMware Program Manager

Thanks Vasily, after un-mounting the drive, I ran this command after identifying the drive as /dev/sdc1 and it worked for me:

tune2fs -j /dev/sdc1

after mounting the drive, I was able to back up and restore with no problems and it now has a journal which gives me some more peace of mind.