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I often use movable disk (USB) to change data between different OSs, almost four kinds -- Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD. Obviously, VFAT is supported in all kinds of OSs. But the short is: It cannot preserve common UNIX attributions, such as ownership, privileges. NTFS is writable using FUSE under Linux and Mac OS X, seems not writable under FreeBSD. Ext2 is accessible under Windows using tools (e.g. ext2fsd), how about it under FreeBSD and Mac OS?

Candidates: Ext2? NTFS? VFAT? It seems Ext2 is good. Any other candidate?

Vivodo
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2 Answers2

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I think ext2 is the only option here - if you need a POSIX compliant FS. Vfat is the obvious choice if you can live without unix ownership.

Kimvais
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I like UDF for my portable storage media filesystem needs, but it comes with a few caveats:

  • No native write support in Windows XP, legacy Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris or pre-10.5 MacOS.
  • No useful reading support in pre-2k Windows.
  • Limited to version 1.50 or 2.01 for write support in Linux.
  • Limited to version 1.50 for read support in OpenBSD(more correctly, not 2.0x), FreeBSD and Solaris.

Taking these into account, you would get decent compatibility with version 1.50, or 2.01 if you don't need *BSD support. I believe the more recent version has some improvements on performance in relation to overwriting, but I'm no expert.

Edit:

Note that there are a lot of incorrect man-pages for mkudffs in the wild. On a usb drive you really want to set the blocksize to 512 bytes. If I remember correctly, things break on Windows otherwise. Also, you probably want to set --media-type=hd.

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Eroen
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