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."

The best is...

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

...ReiserFS. I hear it's killer.

Re:The best is...

[uglyduckling]

Yeah, but it's murder getting support.

Re:The solution..

[molarmass192]

You're words are truthy enough, but your assuming that synergistic words like irregardless don't have impacts on english as we know it. The facts is that people will use words like that wether we like it or not. This is truely, the case when it comes to American's use of language. Sadly, theirs very little we, as people far more litterate than the average people, can really do about that. If people used grammer checkers, then you and me would not see so many people authoring bad words and having a negative affect on english as it is known and practised today but should be editted and spokened tomorrow.

Re:The solution..

[Tanktalus]

No, most people use it because they think they sound smart when they use a big word. The problem is, it's not a word and thus they just sound like an idiot to the very people they are trying to impress when they say or write irregardless.

As a former coworker once told me, "Never use a large word when a diminutive one will suffice." I think he was showing off.

Re:The solution..

[buchner.johannes]

Irregardless, you're new word is stupid.

Re:Ext3

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally go the other way.

homo.

Re:The solution..

[camperdave]

What's the difference between irregardless and regardless?

Irregardless works in the dark.

Re:The solution..

[RogL]

I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!

Re:The solution..

[yukk]

Utter rubbish. Irregardless is a perfectly cromulent word.

Exactly. It embiggens the language.

Re:The solution..

[Simmeh]

He wasn't being fugnutish at all, don't you even know the definition of the word?

Ambiguous??

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so torn between formats, why don't you just partition the external drive with like ten partitions and format each one with a different format -- that way you don't have to choose!

Problem with ReiserFS

[TheLink]

The big problem with ReiserFS: Vendor lock-in.

Re:Problem with ReiserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't it vendor lock down