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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to believe that file system incompatibility is still a thing in this day and age. I wish you could just plug a drive into a computer and not worry about which filesystem it's using, whether it be EXT4, APFS, HFS, NTFS, etc. Seems like FAT/ExFAT is still the only option and as someone who uses multiple operating systems, having to worry about filesystems drives me crazy.

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What's people's opinion on ExFAT these days? I have a Linux laptop and a Macbook, and have been agonizing over which file system to use for an external hard drive. It looks like ExFAT is the only compatible option; but then people have been complaining how unreliable it is.

I use Paragon's EXT3/4 drivers for macOS. The only problem is it changes the root directory's owner to root. Other than that, it's perfectly usable and performant.

The application registers a proper filesystem driver, so it integrates everywhere, incl. Disk Utility and other tools. So you can use it like any other filesystem. Check, format, mount, partition, etc.

For external storage, I find it best to throw some cheap drives in an old desktop and run SAMBA. This allows me to use zfs on the drives, and SAMBA easily interfaces with Mac,Linux, and Windows.

exFAT is fine in a pinch, but it's the only filesystem I've ever truly FUBAR'd by pulling a drive without ejecting. So long as you always safely remove and let the OS sync all the buffers it's probably okay.

For data you really care about, it's probably best to use the HFS driver for Linux or the EXT4 driver for Mac, depending on which OS you use more, and where performance is more important.

exFAT is also the only FS I have had completely die on me like this. These days I only really use external storage for pirated movies to play on my TV so its no big deal. Everything else should be backed up in multiple places.

I just wouldn't. I've had more issues with exFAT than anything else. The only real issue with FAT32 is the 4GB file limit. I've resorted to things like FTP or Syncthing to transfer files between different operating systems, particularly if I have files larger than 4GB. Backup software generally uses small file sizes, so that's something where FAT32 works for all systems.

The 2T limit is stating to get more annoying for FAt32

Too bad we never got FAT64

Arguably, that's exactly what exFAT is (minus all the patent FUD, which by now also seems to be resolved).

Playing around with the default ExFAT setup and a USB3 connected SSD on Ubuntu (copying files over from another hard drive), I found ExFAT (at least in writes) too slow to use. I ended up formatting it at NTFS and it was much faster, it was going into a Windows machine anyway.

I’m curious about the use case for plugging one external drive into multiple computers in 2022, when storage is super cheap and networking is super fast.

If I need to expand storage or keep a hard backup, I dedicate drives to specific machines. If I need to move files between machines, I move them over the network.

Depends on what you mean by "super cheap". I know lots of non-techies who default their PC purchase to whatever is cheapest that seems to fit the bill at the time, and storage now typically can't be expanded after the fact. I just had a fun time updating my partner's 2.5 year-old MacBook to Monterey with a 47gb free space requirement on a 119gb drive.

> I’m curious about the use case for plugging one external drive into multiple computers in 2022, when storage is super cheap and networking is super fast.

I have an external drive for a media library, storing there videos I'd like to watch and audiobooks I'd like to listen. Over years, it's grown pretty large. I'd like to have read/write access to the library from either a Macbook or a linux laptop. The linux laptop is old, and might die soon; and I am not sure whether I'll be replacing it with another linux laptop, or will switch to the Macbook entirely. I know that some people recommend getting an NAS drive; but I don't have appropriate setup for it.

I wonder how you think this could work. Everyone converging on The One Filesystem, and miraculously supporting all filesystems from the past? Something new is invented in the area every few years, would you have that stop, so as not to break compatibility?

Well it would be great if the major vendors provided open-source, cross platform implementations for other OSes. Like Apple maintained an official APFS driver for Windows and Linux, Microsoft did the same for Linux and MacOS, etc.

Linux support for NTFS is pretty good these days; that's one candidate for it. Another would be if Windows adopted ext4 or btrfs.

The latter seems most likely since it offers interesting user-facing features around snapshotting and integrity.

ExFAT works for removable drives, and you probably don’t need OS drives to have the same filesystem.

Read only access would be nice. Sometimes you might want to copy out some files stored on the other OS drive.

At the very least you'd have to forgo all the benefits of ext4 in terms of fragmentation and performance, zfs seamless volume management and countless other things, all for the ability to once in a decade swap a hard drive from one machine to another?

And even with exFAT, permissions will be borked up. So it would be suitable for media hard drive, but wouldn't be suitable (for example) as the mount point of /home in a Linux partition that is also readable from a Windows partition.

Can a file system enforce permissions against an OS that doesn't want to respect them, short of encrypting everything and demanding the host OS supply the key?

No it can't. This is why FDE is a thing— the moment you can talk to the disk from another system, you have root.

Nope, not at all. What I'd want is for the file permissions to be stored when mounting in the Linux partition, and to be read-only when mounted in the Windows partition.

Why is that so hard to believe? Generally filesystems aren’t designed to be super portable, but rather reliable, scalable and fast.

If you’re using one disk/filesystem with multiple operating systems, you are absolutely an outlier, not the general use case.

The only reason that FAT is somewhat portable is that it’s extremely simple and limited. This is also the reason why you absolutely do not want to use it for anything else than USB sticks and the likes.

> If you’re using one disk/filesystem with multiple operating systems, you are absolutely an outlier, not the general use case.

Well... transferring large amount of data between at least Windows and macOS is pretty common in the media/movie/entertainment business, and add Linux to the mix if you're in a development shop.

But surely these businesses will be using a NAS, rather than using a single physical disk on multiple OS’es?

Nothing beats the bandwidth of a truck full of drives on a highway. Shipping large quantities of data - we're talking about dozens of terabytes sometimes - via disk is still incredibly common.

The problem is: while ExFAT has alleviated a lot of issues on disk storage as a sort-of common enough format, there still is no cross-platform disk encryption standard. TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt is, but support is third-party and some companies refuse to use it on security grounds, so usually it's ZIP and sometimes RAR files with passwords.

Sigh.

Sure but these use cases are rare outliers, not something Apple is expected to design their filesystems around.

UDF.

Have you never transferred some files on a USB drive to a colleague who uses a different OS?

Not really no. For as long as I have been working you'd just stick it on the company cloud storage solution and send them a link.

I feel like I'm not too far off the average by only using external storage to load movies on to play on my TV.

> Generally filesystems aren’t designed to be super portable, but rather reliable, scalable and fast.

... or designed to take advantage of today's solid state storage hardware, such as APFS claims to be doing; or at least not generate life-shortening wear-and-tear patterns.

I wish you could just plug a drive into a computer and not worry about which filesystem it's using

Or at least be able to download drivers for the file system you need.

I think the Amiga had that ability. You could just plug in a library for the file system and read whatever disk you wanted to.

Yes it had, and all modern OSes have installable file systems.

The problem isn't that they lack APIs, the problem is having someone implement the support for the desired file system format.

WinBtrfs has (in my limited read-only testing) worked to allow opening btrfs filesystems on Windows, though ntfs2btrfs generates corrupted filesystems which lock up into read-only mode upon certain Linux operations. I have not tested https://github.com/relalis/macos-btrfs but it exists FWIW.

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