Arch Linux

Lowra

Member

Registered: 2009-09-21

Posts: 192

Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

Hi

I currently own a Western Digital 1.0TB external hdd which uses ext4 as filesystem. I recently acquired an iMac and I would like to backup some data from my Linux laptop, and from my iMac on my external hard drive.

The thing is I don't know what filesystem can I choose for that purpose. I would like to be able to read/write on it from both Linux and OSX.
My Linux hdd uses ext4 (not supported by OSX AFAIK)
My OSX hdd uses HFS+ (not supported if I use journaling by Linux AFAIK)

Any recommendation ?

Thanks

ChoK

Member

From: France

Registered: 2008-10-01

Posts: 346

Re: Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

There is atleast one ext2 FUSE implementation for Mac OS X, not sure how reliable it is though. FAT32/VFAT should work ok, and NTFS too but you can't save files bigger than 4G with FAT32, and you will lose file permissions with both solutions. (I use NTFS to move data between Windows 7, OSX and Linux)

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rwd

Member

Registered: 2009-02-08

Posts: 664

Re: Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

B.t.w. you can avoid the whole issue by setting up a NAS server. That way you can do backups using for example rdiff-backup, and let it handle OS-X specific file attributes. It does not matter what filesystem is used on the NAS in that case.

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

NTFS (there is NTFS-3G on OSX too.)

Edit: ok, I kind of missed the "backup" part :-}. Anyway it will work fine for backups if you use the right tool, I suppose...

Last edited by stqn (2011-08-16 12:10:48)

radiomist

Member

From: superposicion

Registered: 2009-11-27

Posts: 64

Re: Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

HFS+ without journal works fine for me

schwede

Member

Registered: 2011-06-28

Posts: 1

Re: Filesystem choice for an external hdd for Linux and OSX

How about exFAT?