How to transfer data between Linux and FreeBSD?

Hello. Probably the title is a bit confusing so let me explain: At the moment I am a Linux user (unsupported Fedora version) but will migrate to FreeBSD in the near future, so I would like to backup my data in an external hard drive to use it in the future system.

However, being a non-technical user, I am a bit confused as to how I should format the external hard drive to be able to retrieve my data in the FreeBSD system.

If you can help me with this issue I would be very grateful. Thanks.
 
You can mount the ext2 file system within FreeBSD and it's pretty simple. Format a USB stick with ext2 and use rsync to transfer your data on to it.
Good luck and welcome to FreeBSD!
 
Like aaron said, but are you going to have two computers with an external drive used between them, or are you planning to reformat the Linux box? I'm a fan of multiple computers for home use and would simply us FTP to transfer files between them.

Welcome to FreeBSD!
 
Depending on the amount of data one could create a gzip/bzip tar file, then copy that to a standard flash drive. FreeBSD can mount a standard format flash drive as well as the lesser systems. ;) Then uncompress and extract the data onto one's FreeBSD system.

Of course since you want to use an external hard drive then you would probably want an ext3/4 format. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ext2fs
 
ZFS would also be a viable solution, with the benefit that you could just zfs send|recv the datasets to FreeBSD. With ZFS you'll also catch bitrot from a dying USB-Stick very early and can dump it before it corrupts any data.
I'm using ZFS on almost all my USB Sticks nowadays exactly because of this. exFAT is just a master recipe for corrupted data, especially with the flashdrive sizes we have today.
 
use ZFS! I have tested it with FreeBSD 13 RC3 and the current Ubuntu 20.04 openzfs version and it works if you stick to non-encrypted datasets.
 
Back
Top