Windows 10: Overwrite exFAT format of 8TB external drive with NTFS?

I have an external WD 8TB My Book: My Book - External Hard Drive | Western Digital (WD)

It is formated in exFat. Could I do a quick format with NTFS? Would this cause any drawbacks?

:)

 

Unclear intentions from Microsoft on USB flash system image backup

I was able to get it to backup to the external drive by formatting the drive as NTFS. It gave me that message too when I had it formatted as exFAT

 

W10 File History Not Backing Up Internal Secondary Drive.

Here is my issue exactly.

I have two internal drives. One SSD and a secondary 8TB drive containing all my media.

I have one 8TB External drive as well, which is my main backup drive.

I use File History to backup my two internal drives onto my external.

I go into the W10 settings, Backup options. Added my secondary drive (M:\) to the 'Back Up These Folders' option. (also not I added my secondary internal drive to my Library.

Boom, I hit the 'Back Up Now' button. Everything seems like it's operating perfectly. Except the problem is nothing from my internal secondary drives is copying over to my Backup drive. With no warning either.

I even checked my event logs and I see this happening:

File/directory was not backed up due to being encrypted or insufficient permissions:

M:\System Volume Information

If you want it to be protected, remove encryption or ask your system administrator to give you access to this file/directory.

My secondary internal was never encrypted. I simply copied all my previous info from my older drives onto my new internal 8TB.

Long story short. My File History will not backup my internal 8TB drive to my External 8TB. It only sees my OS drive (SSD).

I'm clueless at this point.

Running W10.

Internal OS SSD is Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256BG

Internal 8TB Drive is HGST 8TB Nas Drive

External 8TB Backup Drive is Seagate Backup+

I have full admin control of all my drives.

 

It won't cause any drawbacks other than erasing everything that is currently on the drive. I would start with the clean command in diskpart. Just make sure you have the correct drive selected!

 

Thank you!

Unfortunately I do not have any idea of diskpart. Why is it better to use that one, why not the Win partition manager? The clean command? To delete the content of the drive? Anf after formating? Why?

Is there an adavantage of using NTFS? There are some programs (indexing) obviously running much faster with NTFS.

Many thanks again

 

The clean command just resets everything so nothing left behind would interfere with it in the future. You run it from a command prompt (admin) or "run as Administrator" command prompt. Then:

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk # -replace # with the actual number of the 8tb drive
Clean - this will erase the selected disk
Convert gpt
Create part pri
Format fs=ntfs quick
Assign
Exit
Exit

 

Thank you very much!

I am afraid I have any idea of such commands and how to serve that command prompt, very sorry.

 

Main difference between exfat and ntfs is that exfat drives can be read on a mac as well. If you do not need that functionality, ntfs is generally more efficient.

 

Yes, I do not need the drive for Mac, for Win only.

What does it do better?