I’m a new owner of my Librem 14.and a beginner.
I’m asking for help/advice on the best external drive to buy.
I want to back up to an external drive. I have been using my Seagate drive to back up my MacBook Pro.
I want to use a dedicated external drive for my Librem 14 so I am happy to buy a new one.
Could anyone recommend a brand that works well with PureOS/Linux.
Will I have to format it before I run the PureOS Back Up program?
Thanks a whole bunch to all of you for ‘being out there’ with such awesome help!!
Belerry
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I don’t have a recommendation for a brand, aside from ensure you are buying authentic hardware and not similarly packaged drives; because of that issue and because most drives are are more than large enough for my purposes, I just buy from a local store, and will ask if someone there has a recommendation (and then I decide to follow of ignore it!).
In my experience most drives, once formatted, will work. When I’m in the store I normally do a search: “$brand ssd linux” or similar, to try to find horror or success stories, but I’ve either been very lucky, or standardization has been effective to make most regular external drives just work. 
Yep. You can use the application called Disks to format your new drive.
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I’ve never had a USB drive not work in Linux. You probably won’t have to format it, but unless its sharing files with a windows machine, you should.
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You might have to. As drives get bigger, they may be formatted by default as exFAT - and support for that file system may or may not be present by default. (I think PureOS may omit exFAT support by default.)
So another answer to the original question might be: very likely the drive will contain some file system by default. See what file system that is - using another computer if needed - and see whether that file system is supported on your distro. Then decide on a course of action based on, first, necessity and, second, preference.
Yes. I would format as ext4 as a matter of course.
I am yet to encounter a problem with disk support in Linux. Bear in mind that if a disk were to require a special driver to work in Linux and that driver is going to be loaded from disk then … whoops. (OK, admittedly that only applies to the boot drive but still.)
How big? Magnetic or SSD?
I’m using Samsung and SanDisk portable SSDs. I have some Hitachi and Western Digital portable magnetic disks (Hitachi now part of Western Digital anyway).
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Beware of cheap Chinese gear from Amazon. You can’t really know what crap is inside. I recently advised a friend to buy a 1 TB USB drive from Best Buy for 40 USD. Works fine.
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I’m interested as well, perhaps someone could suggest a few tried and true USB drives, maybe 1-2 TB, that folks here should consider?
Thanks a whole bunch to all of you!! Great advice.
I am so happy for your comments re Chinese gear from Amazon. I had been looking at the FEISHUO.
But I also researched the Western Digital and LG at Best Buy.
Thanks also for the formatting advice.
Good to go now!!
Bellery