I recently bought a external hard drive to store some data on. I use Linux but I am not a power user. If I format the drive to EXT4, is it possible for the permissions to ever screw up and I lost access to my data? I will be plugging the drive into several different linux based computers at work and I frequently hop distros on my main home machine. I need to make sure I don't lose any data because I overlooked something. I am not familiar with EXT 3 or 4. So far I have done this : Formatted drive to EXT4 ran gksudo thunar and changed the permissions to my user account and all settings to read/write Wrote all the files I need to the drive I really appreciate any help.