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EXT3 in Windows
EXT3 in Windows
In The perfect backup in Linux we have seen how to obtain an automatic backup of our documents in Linux.
Ext3
The suggested backup methods has the nice feature that it keeps snapshots of the files in your hard disk at given times in the past, so that recovering an old version of a document is extremely easy.
However, to avoid waste of disk space, only files that have been modified have to be stored, while the others are only stored as links to old versions. This solution is extremely smart, but it requires that your backup device is in EXT3 filesystem.
How to access EXT3 partitions in windows?
Suppose now that you have to access your backup files from a Windows machine. It may be another computer of yours, or it may be a computer that your friend lends to you because yours is dead (remember, that's why you need backups!)
There are two possible solutions:
Filesystems drivers
The first solution consists in installing a driver in your windows machine that allow Windows to see all ext2/3 partitions.
This driver can be found on www.fs-driver.org and allows you to both read and write files on your ext3 device as it was a regular windows partition.
All programs can access those files (for example, in any application you can select Save as... and you will be allowed to browse through those folders.
Standalone program
Sometimes you may want to avoid installing any file on the windows computer. For example because it is not your computer and you don't have administrator rights.
In that case I suggest you to use the program Explore2fs.
This program allows you to browse through an EXT3 partition, and to read files (not to write them, though).
Moreover, this program do NOT allow other applications to access the EXT3 partition, so you will need to copy the files to a NTFS partition first, to be able to access them.
