Cross-OS File System That Sucks Less?

An anonymous reader writes "I recently got an external hard disk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro. So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works well under Linux, MacOS X, and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+. Are we stuck with crummy VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?"

Comments

Moving Target

[gadzook33]

Not really, right? Even if there was, Microsoft doesn't seem to be interested in keeping it that way. With the "advent" of Vista and whatever relational-style FS they might try to forcably upgrade us to in the future, what are the odds of the prototypical modern journaling, etc FS being shared across the two? My guess is you're stuck with ext on linux and NTFS or whatever else on Windows. Of course, you could run NTFS on Linux if you've got two big brass ones.

Shared storage, not shared drive

[zzatz]

Trying to use a filesystem across multiple platforms is painful. That's a clue that you're tackling the wrong problem. You don't need to share filesystems, you need to share files. Different problem with different solutions.

I set up an old PC with Linux to solve many needs. NFS and Samba provide a common pool of storage for every OS that I use. Since setting that up, I haven't ever though about shared partitions. They aren't needed.

Linux and Samba worked for me, but that's not the only solution. A NAS box might work better for you. The point is that you need shared storage, not a shared drive. Every OS supports network storage. Every OS supports backups across the network.

Forget it

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Personally I have a golden rule I always keep in mind when dealing with cross-OS file system usage: Never trust write support on foreign filesystem drivers. FAT12/16/32 is the only exception, since it's so old and primitive that anyone should have fully mastered the support of it by now. But apart from that, I'll never believe a filesystem driver to reliably write on ext2/3 outside of Linux, or HFS+ outside of OS X, or NTFS outside of Windows.

Modern filesystems are complicated beasts. One tiny error can have catastrophic results. Native filesystem drivers are the results of many years of real-life testing by millions of users. Can you really believe a third-party filesystem driver to be solid enough to write on a foreign filesystem?

Read-only support is OK because it's a magnitude easier to implement, though.

The only viable solution to cross-OS filesystem usage (without crippling yourself to FAT32) is networking.

Re:You're not very smart, are you?

[Enderandrew]

It may turn out that Hans Reiser is guilty. However, he is innocent until found guilty. And if he is guilty, that doesn't taint everything he ever did. That is like saying Germany should have recounted all the construction, development and wealth of the Hitler era. If you drive on any part of the autobahn constructed during his reign, then clearly you must be a nazi, right?

So, please drop the trolling and stop calling it MurdererFS. It is an insult to the many employees of NameSys who developed the code, and continue to do so today. Not to mention, it would certainly be an unfair accusation if Reiser is acquitted.

Re:You're not very smart, are you?

[TheNetAvenger]

NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage, and requires regular reformatting

Wow this is news to anyone that knows anything about the NTFS structure.

I love how people can make garbage claims like this, yet there are companies that are running NTFS volumes that are 15years old without any incident. You know companies like EDS, GM, and other agencies like Lockheed and NASA.

But I'm sure youf 'assessment' of NTFS is much smarter than the 'rocket scientists' at these organizations.

Let's take your starting line "NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage."

Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.

So please do englighten us all with your knowledge so I can call my contacts at NASA and tell them how stupid they are for trusting NTFS and explain to them that their systems are getting slower.

The lack of this competitive technological drive is probably why Windows has been the same POS for the last 20 years.


Or maybe it is because the NT team designed the OS so that it was highly extensible and would meet OS requirements for 15-20 at the minimum, considering it still has core kernel features that are not even used or exposed in Vista yet even.

The problem is, people like you, see Windows as Win3.1/Win9x and Windows of today running on the NT Core is a different OS, a different design, shares no code, and yet still has the same UI concepts so people aren't bright enough to realize that the underlying NT architecture is actually one of the few things MS has ever done right.

Go read up on NTFS, and Windows NT before you come back, you are only embarrasing yourself, and that is hard to do on Slashdot when talking about Windows and NT.

Re:You're not very smart, are you?

[SillyNickName]

Remember that feature wise it was doing most of what it does back in 1991 when other FS drastically PALED in comparison.

As a blanket statement, that just isn't true. It had more features than some other file systems, but less than others. Microsoft didn't exactly invent NTFS from scratch, they copied much of it from elsewhere and from some other systems that NTFS and Windows still can't match. Ever hear of FILES-11 and VMS? I thought not. Believe it or not, the whole world of computers isn't just Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. BSD.

And even today the only FS that comes close to being as features as NTFS is ZFS and it even is missing several features NTFS has had for 10 years.

There you go again. NTFS has some features that some other file systems don't and others have some features that NTFS doesn't. It depends on what you're looking for.

One important limitation of FAT32

[El_Oscuro]

4GB per file. If your backup job creates large tarballs, your hosed. At work, I was trying to backup a 20GB file to a USB external drive, and it told me the drive was out of space, even though it still had 700GB left. I had to format it NTFS for it to work.