How "reliable" is exFAT/FAT64?

[Justin]

Now that OSX supports exFAT, that's what I'm going to use to archive my
family videos and pictures onto portable hard drives.
Since I'm switching to AVCHD, where the videos are files, my plan is to
have two 2.5" USB2 hard drives formatted to exFAT. One (maybe both?) in
my safety deposit box and one in my house somewhere.
If exFAT a "legit" filesystem for this use? I realize it is proprietary
and from Microsoft, but knowing the drive should be able to be read and
written to using Windows and Mac is something I really need to have.

If OSX supported ext3 or 4 that's what I would use.

 

[Rod Speed]

Justin wrote

Now that OSX supports exFAT, that's what I'm going to use
to archive my family videos and pictures onto portable hard drives.

Since I'm switching to AVCHD, where the videos are files, my
plan is to have two 2.5" USB2 hard drives formatted to exFAT.
One (maybe both?) in my safety deposit box and one in my
house somewhere. If exFAT a "legit" filesystem for this use?

Yes. But since its relatively new, not as much is known about how bullet proof it is.

And clearly using it reduces your recovery options.

With NTFS, Linux does provide a very viable recovery alternative if you need it.

 

[Ed Light]

More people will elaborate, but I would suggest using NTFS.
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[Yousuf Khan]

Now that OSX supports exFAT, that's what I'm going to use to archive my
family videos and pictures onto portable hard drives.
Since I'm switching to AVCHD, where the videos are files, my plan is to
have two 2.5" USB2 hard drives formatted to exFAT. One (maybe both?) in
my safety deposit box and one in my house somewhere.
If exFAT a "legit" filesystem for this use? I realize it is proprietary
and from Microsoft, but knowing the drive should be able to be read and
written to using Windows and Mac is something I really need to have.

If OSX supported ext3 or 4 that's what I would use.

There's a royalty associated with exFAT, that is given to Microsoft.
Whether flashdrive makers are willing to pay the royalty to Microsoft in
a business that is extremely low-margins remains to be seen.

Given that, I suppose the flashdrive makers could just format to regular
FAT32, and let customers reformat to exFAT as needed. They could also
format to NTFS, which I would say is a more reliably tested system.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Justin]

More people will elaborate, but I would suggest using NTFS.

Remember I'm on a Mac primarily. I have used MacFUSE + NTFS-3G before
exFAT was supported on OSX. External drives formatted to NTFS were
terribly slow and sometimes I would get filesystem errors that could
only be fixed (per NTFS-3G's message) on a Windows machine.
I suppose I could use HFS+...

The reason I'm so hell bent on being able to read from multiple OSes is
the fact I don't know the future. Maybe Microsoft will dump the NT
kernel for some sort of 'nix - in which case I would consider going back
to Windows.

 

[Rod Speed]

Justin wrote

Remember I'm on a Mac primarily. I have used MacFUSE + NTFS-3G before
exFAT was supported on OSX. External drives formatted to NTFS were
terribly slow and sometimes I would get filesystem errors that could
only be fixed (per NTFS-3G's message) on a Windows machine.
I suppose I could use HFS+...

The reason I'm so hell bent on being able to read from multiple OSes
is the fact I don't know the future. Maybe Microsoft will dump the NT
kernel for some sort of 'nix

Not a chance.

 

[Justin]

As far as I can see, you are looking for a reliable file system that you
will use primarily from a Mac, but you also need to be accessible from
other machines. If you only need read-only access from other machines,
then the answer is easy - HFS+. There are free read-only HFS+ drivers
for windows, and Linux has no problems reading HFS+. There are
commercial read-write solutions for Windows, and I believe you can write
to HFS+ from Linux if you disable the journal (I haven't tried that myself).

I tried that with Ubuntu - buggy and finicky.

Another option is ext2 or ext3. Obviously Linux access is easy, and
Windows access is through a free driver. Mac access is through MacFUSE,
AFAIK. I have no idea if you will get the same speed issues as you had
with NTFS - but if not, then it could be an alternative.

MacFUSE only supports ext2.

NTFS is out of the question. It is simply too slow on my Macs. I'll
probably format one to HFS+ and one to exFAT.

 

[Arno]

Now that OSX supports exFAT, that's what I'm going to use to archive my
family videos and pictures onto portable hard drives.
Since I'm switching to AVCHD, where the videos are files, my plan is to
have two 2.5" USB2 hard drives formatted to exFAT. One (maybe both?) in
my safety deposit box and one in my house somewhere.
If exFAT a "legit" filesystem for this use? I realize it is proprietary
and from Microsoft, but knowing the drive should be able to be read and
written to using Windows and Mac is something I really need to have.

If OSX supported ext3 or 4 that's what I would use.

(ex)FAT, like FAT is at the lowest level of reliability:
If anything goes wrong, you will get damaged files, directories
and may even lose files that were not involved in the operation.
To put it differently, FAT expects everything to work correctly,
but is very simple to implement.

ext2/3/4 on the other hand are filesystems that expect things
to go wrong. In the Unix world, computers traditionally run
24/7 and the expected reason for a restart is an unexpected
power failure. Hence these filesystems have a high resilience
against things going wrong, with data-loss typically only
in files that were written at the moment of the power-failure
and no impact on other files. The downside is complex
implementation.

That said, (ex)FAT is about the worst possible option for
a backup target device. Don't use it. You are mixing two
functions here: Cross platform compatibility with Win und
OSX and backup-level reliability. That gives you a
"solution" that is not really suitable for either.

If you really need the direct windows access to the
filesystem (which I doubt), you can try something like
Ext2Fsd (http://www.ext2fsd.com), which allows ext2/3/4
access from windows. You do not get ext3/4 features though,
only ext2. Still, even ext2 is in a whole different class
as FAT, reliability-wise.

Arno

 

[Justin]

I have only needed to work with an HFS format disk once, and it was so
long ago that it was HFS and not HFS+, I think. I had no problems
reading it with Linux (Knoppix, IIRC) - I mounted the disk and read the
files. But I didn't try writing at all.


ext2 is still a perfectly good file system. Although it doesn't have a
journal to prevent metadata corruption during unexpected power failures,
it is a solid, robust, and mature filesystem. It is certainly more
efficient and reliable than FAT, NTFS or exFAT.


Of course, it is also possible to just use FAT32. Windows cannot easily
format big disks in FAT32, but Linux and presumably MacOS have no such
artificial limits, and once formatted Windows can work fine with it.

fat32 is also a no-go. I will be dealing with files way bigger than 4GB.