Today we want to partition a Disk, in order to backup our Linux ext4 Filesystem. We use ext4, because it enables us to store all symbolic links, devices, permissions, ownerships, modification times, ACLs, and extended attributes.

1. Get Disk Device Name

First we need to know our <diskname>. To print our Block Special Devices, we run in Terminal:

lsblk

In the resulting NAME column we can see the names of all our Disks and Partitions.

2. clear Partition Table

We can now use the <diskname> to clear the the PartitionTable to make a clean setup. gdisk helps us with that:

sudo gdisk /dev/<diskname>
d
n
w

3. Format Disk

With fdisk we can format our Disk to Type Linux:

sudo fdisk /dev/<diskname>
d
n
p
w

4. Set Filesystem Type

We can once again run lsblk to get the name of our part <partname>. Then we can set our Filesystem Type to ext4 via the Terminal:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -qF /dev/<partname>

5. Label Disk Partition

Labels are used to auto mount Partitions We can now name our <partname>, by choosing a <label>:

sudo e2label /dev/<partname> <label>