Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a good start, and it could help provide more choice in cross-platform data storage and data exchange. Recently I looked once again, as I usually do once every few years, at options for exchanging data through external drives between Windows, macOS and Linux (I prefer USB drives, which are faster than speeds I can attain over the network). Shockingly, it seemed to me like NTFS was the easier filesystem to go with (Linux has good support for it, and macOS needs a third party driver for write support)!

Back to this project, I feel there is a strong need to have a set of GUI tools (beyond Windows Shell Extensions) to take advantage of the btrfs filesystem features (like creating snapshots, sending snapshots to backup storage, etc.). I use btrfs on Linux, and the lack of good, up-to-date GUI tools to use its feature set has been a source of frustration (yes, I can use the command line, but then that would restrict the usage only to me, leaving out the other not-so-tech-savvy people around).

> options for exchanging data through external drives between Windows, macOS and Linux

How is the UDF support on macOS? I ask since I relatively recently chose UDF as the Windows/Linux common HDD file system format, but I did not consider macOS.

The trick for cross platform UDF is formatting the whole stick as UDF, without partitioning (no MBR, GPT, or APM). In that case, it works, I tested this just last week on Windows 10, Fedora 26, macOS 10.12.

It's totally sane. It's "like" FAT32 except you don't have the 2G filesize limitation. NTFS might also be sane, but out of the box macOS doesn't have write support.

AFAIK it is fully supported, I also use often UDF, though for whatever reasons there are not so many users around, after all it is a formally documented and "standard" filesystem ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format

but somehow everyone thinks that it is only fod CD/DVD's.

Right, macOS has had NTFS read support for quite a few years. I recently heard that the native driver can be enabled to provide write support as well. I just googled it and it requires editing /etc/fstab on a per-drive basis and has some downsides.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-enable-ntfs-writ...

There are also commercial products available, e.g. https://www.paragon-software.com/ufsdhome/ntfs-mac/

There are a few different external drives, for example the ones from Seagate and Toshiba, that come with NTFS drivers for Mac or allow the customer to download them for free. All external drives are also usually factory formatted as NTFS, in my experience.

There's also ExFAT which is natively supported by Windows and MacOS.

And was created pretty much because the last patents on FAT32 finally expired.

As a video editer the fuctionally of ExFat compared to Fat32 isn't even close to what I need them for. Fat32 can't store files larger then 4GB which is basically 99% percent of 4K videos that I deal with.

I would have preferred either a minimal update extending FAT32 to FAT64 (sort of like the extension from FAT12 to FAT32), or a better filesystem with journaling/etc.

ExFat it's great for USB flash drives and a easy way to get around this. But I had a few bad experiences with the lack of journaling working with a HDD.

Maybe not a deal breaker for a lot, but for crucial data, my advice will be build a cheap NAS with Linux inside, and pass all data between OSs over network

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