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

Re:Quick answer: No

[whoever57]

There is also an EXT2 driver for MAC-OS, so this makes ext2/3 look like the most portable option after FAT.

One problem with the Windows ext2 driver, though -- if the filesystem is not clean when you attempt to open in in Windows, Windows helpfully offers to re-format it.

Re:Moving Target

[NickFortune]

Of course, you could run NTFS on Linux if you've got two big brass ones.

You could do it if you had a pair of sub-atomic soap bubbles. ntfs-3g has been stable for a while now.