Thanks Adam, that all makes more sense now :)
What I am a bit puzzled by is how a 14GB home folder manages to take up 
50GB when I use backintime to take a snapshot. This is the first 
snapshot so I wouldn't expect it to be any bigger than the data it is 
backing up at this point in time!
Any ideas? The website 
http://www.le-web.org/back-in-time/ isn't much 
help really and I can't see any obvious forums anywhere.
Ritchie
Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:
> On Sunday 25 Jan 2009, Vic wrote:
>   
>>> The data I am backing up is in ext3 format, would I be best of using
>>> ext2 or ext3 for the external drive? Or any other file system?
>>>       
>> Choose ext3 over ext2 for this sort of thing - ext2 is very fragile in
>> respect of power loss, random unplugging, etc. ext3 is very much more
>> reilient.
>>     
>
> Vic is correct ext3 is better than ext2. Basically ext2 and ext3 are the same 
> base filesystem, but the version 3 has a number of extra features the most 
> important being it has a journal which means that in the event of major 
> problems like power failures and such it will recover much faster and 
> probably with less data loss.
>
> Ext3 is not actually more reliable than ext2 in normal use, the data can 
> usually still be recovered on an ext2 filesystem that has had a problem, it's 
> just that ext3 recovery may a few seconds and not involve much manual work, 
> whereas on a large multi-giga byte disk it make take many minutes or even 
> hours with ext2 and require some hand intervation.
>
> Pretty much every Linux distro available today uses ext3 as default and there 
> is normally no reason to use the older ext2 version - though there are still 
> valid reasons for doing so.
>
>