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

userspace....

[leuk_he]

The fact that it runs in userspace means it can corrupt your data from userspace instead corrupting other programs from kernal space.

a program of driver that runs in userspace does not make it good program...... 8p

ZFS is useful on single disk systems

[this great guy]

Actually ZFS is very attractive even on single-disk systems. Some ZFS developers are using it on their laptop because:

• ZFS keeps redundant copies of metadata (directory entries, inodes, etc). Which means, for example, that if only 1 block causes a corruption of the /home inode, a traditional FS would typically crash and prevent you from accessing anything under that dir (even if that data is healthy), whereas ZFS will use the redundant copy, self-heal itself by rewriting the 1st copy, and let you access the data under /home.
• You can also do zfs set copies=2 pool/fs to make use of the above feature for regular data. Of course this double the required disk space, and is by no mean a raid1 replacement, but you may use that feature to improve data reliability even with a single disk.
• And don't forget all the other ZFS features: detection and correction of silent data corruption (especially important if your data go through a noisy USB cable), expandability of the pool (add a 2nd drive to your existing single USB drive to make use of raid1: "zpool attach pool disk1 disk2"), no more messing with partitions (ability to dynamically resize filesystems...), simpler to administer, etc.

Heck, there are lots of reasons for using ZFS on single-disk systems !

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

[marcello_dl]

Since he also may be innocent until found guilty, parent posters have a point nonetheless, don't they?