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I have a super small drive on my ultraportable lenovo 100s. I want to sync several gb of stuff from my dropbox onto it, so I have equipped it with a western digital purple sd card.

I plan to use that media as the storage device on which I will put my dropbox folder.

I am seeking advice on which filesystem to use given the possibly frequent refresh (read/write) activity of dropbox and the nature of sd card (not as resistent as hard drive). I am running a 32-bit Rapberry Pi OS, based on Debian 11.

I am aware of this but it is a bit dated and not specific to my use case.

Rho Phi
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2 Answers2

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Whatever file-system you may use, be aware that SD cards are fragile. Do not expect to use your card for a long time, and be prepared for it to fail without notice.

Most file-systems will do, as long as you disable journaling. Your card itself does wear-leveling, so this is not required in the file-system and you could pick one that is simple and efficient.

You may find some information in the post Best File system for microSD used for snapshots & storage, where a user detailed some statistics about his (terribly cheap) SD cards that he used extensively:

  • EXT4 with journaling - 7 days
  • EXT4 w/o journaling - 12 days
  • BTRFS - 6 months
  • Read-only BTRFS with APT wrapper - survived 2 years, exceeding the test length

Seems like BTRFS is a good match. If you intend to use the card on non-Linux computers, exFAT will do.

harrymc
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It turns out that Dropbox works only with Ext4 on 32-bit systems, so the question has only one answer due to the limitation of dropbox on linux. BTRFS was not listed by my dropbox gui as an actually available option.

Rho Phi
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