Hi guys,
i have a question, i have an external drive in exfat, is is possible to convert it to ext4 filesystem without damaging the data?

short answer: no.

long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

at least not without putting orders of magnitude more effort into it than simply copying the data somewhere, reformatting, then copying the data back.

@tosensei that's a lot of work damn it

@dIREsTRAITS it's work _your computer_ does for you, though. write a script, launch it, go grab a drink.

@tosensei yeah right maybe I'll grab a pussy, better than a drink haha

@dIREsTRAITS well, you certainly may _try_ - but don't get your hopes up.

No. You have to move all of the data out of the current filesystem, create a new filesystem, copy all the data back.

In theory you _could_ create an ext4 on top of your current fs and use testdisk to recover data from underneath. However, this is neither faster nor safer and comes with undefined risks [e.g. see one of my last posts about a found sd card] and will only recover _some_ data

Possible, but don’t.

Copy the data, reformat the drive, copy it back. It’ll save you time and effort, and probably your hair too.

Like @tosensei said: write a script, grab a beer. Let bash do the work.

The internet says you can shrink+defrag ExFAT partitions with some obscure program. This means that if you have free space on the drive for the largest file + both FS' overhead, you can create an ext4 partition, move the files one by one, and shrink the exfat partition whenever the ext4 partition is full. It sounds like a really slow operation though, and you need to script a lot of uncommon behavior to properly automate it.

https://superuser.com/questions/...

My source on exfat shrinking

Also DiskGenius is a GUI program so you need to write/record some cursor macros.

Maybe just reformat the disk and copy the data from your backup if you're lazy and adventurous.