Any particular reason you’re not immediately jumping to NTFS? Considering your concern around tech illiterate family members, any non standard formats may cause issue.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Given it's for your death, why not have multiple copies in multiple formats? For for Mac, one in ext4 and one in NTFS? Youd have multiple copies of your will so why not this.
exFAT will work just fine for pictures and videos, it's stuff like databases or maildir (saving the emails one email=one file) or other similar workloads that are the problem. Also it'll disable write cache usually and you could just yank the drive.
I'd keep all "working drives", the ones that are used mostly as an internal drive even if external (a block device is a block device despite some people here needing a fainting couch when they read the letters "USB"). Everything for backups, to be used between multiple persons or computers I'd do exFAT. Mostly because it's MISSING the following (from annoying to dangerous to disastrous): permissions, junctions (links) and EFS.
Multiple copies. All formatted ext4. I say this because there will always be an OS capable of reading it that can be freely downloaded.
If I remember right, osx has native support for reading only NTFS disks, and it's not the other way around (windows doesn't support hfs+ or apfs, not even reading). I'm in a similar situation, I have multiple copies on different formats, but the main data is on a ntfs
What you could do instead is write down idiot proof guides on how to access things from mac and windows, write down passwords, tell them how to access ntfs from Mac and vice versa etc.
It’s what I’m doing. Only bad thing is that you have to update it every once in a a while because things change.
3 options:
- EXT4 (works in other OSs with aditional software)
- NTFS (works in other operative systems)
- ExFAT (works in other operative systems)
Consider UDFS as Windows can format partitions/disks using the UDF file system but you can only do it via the command line, you can then read and write to it as you would to a normal disk, I believe Linux and Mac's can access it just as easily as long as you don't set the version too high and it is common to all three OS's.
e.g.
FORMAT volume [/FS:file-system] [/V:label] [/Q] [/A:size] [/C] [/X] [/P:passes] [/S:state] /FS:filesystem Specifies the type of the file system (FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, or UDF).
/R:revision UDF only: Forces the format to a specific UDF version (1.02, 1.50, 2.00, 2.01, 2.50). The default revision is 2.01.
/D UDF 2.50 only: Metadata will be duplicated.
If only Apple and MS would adopt EXT4...
take it the other way around - NTFS is supported on pretty much everything. Linux, BSD (dont know about MacOS), and of course Windows. right now, i use it as a "bridge" filesystem to exchange data between different OSes. open source drivers reached the state of development, that they work well. so i'd say - ditch exFAT and stick to NTFS.
So if I go into Gparted format these things NTFS, any modern OSX machine can read/write them? Your "bridge" idea is exactly what I want but when I Google it the results advertise software to download and install on OSX that makes it work with NTFS.
I really wouldn't know since I've not touched OSX in over a decade.
Great thread topic, thanks, I hadn’t heard about these issues.