Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives?

rufey writes "I've recently embarked on a project to rip my DVD and CD collection to a pair of external USB drives. One drive will be used on a daily basis to access the rips of music and DVDs, as well as store backups of all of my other data. The second drive will be a copy of the first drive, to be synced up on a monthly basis and kept at a different location. The USB drives that I purchased for this are 1 TB in size and came pre-formatted with FAT32. While I can access this filesystem from all of my Windows and Linux machines, there are some limitations." Read on for the rest, and offer your advice on the best filesystem for this application. "Namely, the file size on a FAT32 filesystem is limited to 4GB (4GB less 1 byte to be technical). I have some files that are well over that size that I want to store, mostly raw DVD video. I'll primarily be using these drives on a Linux-based system, and initially, with a Western Digital Live TV media player. I can access a EXT3 filesystem from both of these, and I'm thinking about reformatting to EXT3. But on Windows, it requires a 3rd party driver to access the EXT3 filesystem. NTFS is an option, but the Linux kernel NTFS drivers (according to the kernel build documentation) only have limited NTFS write support, only being safe to overwrite existing files without changing the file size). The Linux-NTFS project may be able to mitigate my NTFS concerns for Linux, but I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable. At some point I'd like whatever filesystem I use to be accessible to Apple's OS X. With those constraints in mind, which filesystem would be the best to use? I realize that there will always be some compatibility problems with whatever I end up with. But I'd like to minimize these issues by using a filesystem that has the best multi-OS support for both reading and writing, while at the same time supporting large files."

Comments

Under a rock?

[Petersko]

"Have you been living under a rock? NTFS has been writable on Linux for a long time now..."

Oh yeah, because the determining factor of one's general awareness is whether or not one knows that NTFS is writeable on linux.

I knew that, but I certainly didn't hear the announcement on a TV ad during "House".

Re:PSA

[polemistes]

Irregardless is a word irregardless of what you may think now. Since irregardelss of the absence of use of the word irregardless in the past, if enough people use the term irregardless enough times and in enough contexts, irregardless of the proper use, I'm sure it will find its place in the dictionaries in the future irregardless of the fact that it is a very presumtious word.
Disclaimer: IANANES (I Am Not A Native English Speaker).

When it comes to the filesystems: ext3, slow on Windows, but works (I think, I don't use windows, so I must confess I haven't tried it), ntfs, a bit slow in Linux, but works (I have tried it), you don't use the kernel driver, but the FUSE ntfs-3g driver. File system driver in kernel or user space, you don't want to care.