Cross-OS File System That Sucks Less? 449
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?"
Network it, or NTFS (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Network it, or NTFS (Score:5, Informative)
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sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
I don't know wether it does or not, but does OSX support ntfs-3g?
FalconRe:Network it, or NTFS (Score:4, Informative)
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ [google.com]
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ [ntfs-3g.org]
Here is a set of instructions to get it working, it mentions much older versions, but the idea is the same:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-
Re:Network it, or NTFS (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Network it, or NTFS (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'd be surprised if it wasn't in Ubuntu already.
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Re:Doesn't work with a Macbook. (Score:5, Informative)
See above.
Re:Doesn't work with a Macbook. (Score:5, Informative)
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All experience I have had, and have heard of, shows it to be robust and bug-free.
Thad
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I guess that you also don't use Samba either
You're not very smart, are you? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You're not very smart, are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, please drop the trolling and stop calling it MurdererFS. It is an insult to the many employees of NameSys who developed the code, and continue to do so today. Not to mention, it would certainly be an unfair accusation if Reiser is acquitted.
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AllegedMurdererFS ?
(is there a decent filesystem, that unlike NTFS, works with Win98+FreeBSD, too?)
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As a blanket statement, that just isn't true. It had more features than some other file systems, but less than others. Microsoft didn't exactly invent NTFS from scratch, they copied much of it from elsewhere and from some other systems that NTFS and Windows still can't match. Ever hear of FILES-11 and VMS? I thought not. Believe it or not, the whole world of computers isn't just Windows v
Re:You're not very smart, are you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow this is news to anyone that knows anything about the NTFS structure.
I love how people can make garbage claims like this, yet there are companies that are running NTFS volumes that are 15years old without any incident. You know companies like EDS, GM, and other agencies like Lockheed and NASA.
But I'm sure youf 'assessment' of NTFS is much smarter than the 'rocket scientists' at these organizations.
Let's take your starting line "NTFS is also unusably slow after 6 months of heavy usage."
Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.
So please do englighten us all with your knowledge so I can call my contacts at NASA and tell them how stupid they are for trusting NTFS and explain to them that their systems are getting slower.
The lack of this competitive technological drive is probably why Windows has been the same POS for the last 20 years.
Or maybe it is because the NT team designed the OS so that it was highly extensible and would meet OS requirements for 15-20 at the minimum, considering it still has core kernel features that are not even used or exposed in Vista yet even.
The problem is, people like you, see Windows as Win3.1/Win9x and Windows of today running on the NT Core is a different OS, a different design, shares no code, and yet still has the same UI concepts so people aren't bright enough to realize that the underlying NT architecture is actually one of the few things MS has ever done right.
Go read up on NTFS, and Windows NT before you come back, you are only embarrasing yourself, and that is hard to do on Slashdot when talking about Windows and NT.
Re:You're not very smart, are you? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it's more-or-less a straight lift of FILES-11. You may or may not believe this, but your NTFS is almost compatible with VMS disks. Sadly, it's a pale imitiation - although there is the facility for things like file versioning, it's non-functional and can probably never be properly implemented without significant refactoring.
Pity, really. Windows nearly had something really good going for it there.
You are both right (Score:3, Interesting)
Laptops.
Laptops off the bat have drives with fewer heads, and therefore are more sensitive to fragmentation. Furthermore I have seen laptops delivered with FAT file systems with 512 byte block sizes which on converting to NTFS yield cluster sizes that are smaller than optimal. I have also seen laptops delivered with 512 byte cluster NTFS.
Fragmentation is a huge problem under these circumstances, and lord help you if your MFT gets fragmented.
Pret
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Forget hard drive (Score:5, Funny)
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Sid, Is that you?
Refrence; Userfriendly.org Jan 07 2002
"hief, Smiling Man, Sid
-
Chief: This quibbling about who the decision-maker is stops now. Do you two have any idea how power struggles invariably end?
ZZZZOOOOOWWWW
Darkeness
Chief: So did you not do the finance guy thing this week and neglect to pay electricity bill?
Smiling Man: Look, I can't get that stupid punchcard reader to work!
Sid: All you gotta do is ask man. That,
Ext3 (Score:5, Informative)
I just use a external drive formatted in EXT3, and for windows files i just install the Ext3 driver.
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I use an external NAS. It uses an encrypted Reiser filesystem. The NAS takes care of offering to the network NFS or SMB shares. In an outage, the shares unmount and require the encryption key to remount. This provides protection in case of theft of the drive. Per share I can provide either NFS and/or SMB services so it plays nice to Windows, Linux, and Mac. Putting stuff on it is as easy as posting on S
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Moving Target (Score:4, Insightful)
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You could do it if you had a pair of sub-atomic soap bubbles. ntfs-3g [ntfs-3g.org] has been stable for a while now.
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Re:Moving Target - ntfs-3g (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, I have to ask, have you or has anyone you know ever tried to run a Linux distro off of a NTFS system? I'm not sure why you'd want to but I'm curious as heck if it is possible.
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ext2 supported everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
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Curious: why wouldn't you suggest ext3? Is it not supported so well or something? At least suggest a journalling filesystem instead of something old and suffer obsolescence. Really you should be suggesting ext3 + ACLs, or something better thank you.
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ext2 is better than NTFS? Seriously? Have you been eating the yellow snow or something? (I'll give you that ext2 is better than Fat32, but then again nearly everything is.)
for windows, http://www.fs-driver.org/ [fs-driver.org]
You have an interesting definition of the word "supported." From the FAQ:
Useful Link? (Score:2)
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Been there, Done that (Score:5, Informative)
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Of course fat32 still works just fine for this application, but it's getting a little long in the tooth as far as advanced features and modern storage needs go (c'mon what is up with those weak filesize limits)!?!?
When Tim Paterson first wrote QDOS, he thought that four bytes would be more than enough for file size (10MB hard drives cost several grand at the time) and that also happened to fit in with a 4 byte data element in CP/M's file control block. At least we weren't stuck with the bit-map from CP/M.
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One could create ISO (image) files, but those often need special permissions to mount in GNU/Linux and a mount program in Windows; this is a difficulty in restricted environments.
Plus an ISO would have the same (or worse) restriction as FAT32, namely the limits on file size.
FAT32 appears to be 4 GB [wikipedia.org], while ISO 9660 is 2 GB or 4.2 GB [wikipedia.org].
Perhaps another option along those lines would be to mount a UDF [wikipedia.org] ISO image? Or does it matter?
HFS+ can be case-sensitive (Score:3, Informative)
For quite some time now (10.3 Panther I think) there has been a case-sensitive variant of HFS+. The Linux kernel has supported mounting it for some time now since I contributed a patch after realizing I couldn't access my filesystem. Unfortunately, it does not support HFS+ journaling so you have to make sure OS X gets shut down properly. Also, the last time I looked, the open source HFS+ utilities like fsck did not handle case-sensitive HFS+. I looked into fixing it but it was such a god-awful mess of code I decided I didn't trust it anyway.
On Windows you should be able to use MacDrive but you may want to check with them to make sure that case-sensitive HFS+ is supported. I only say this because for instance Alsoft's DiskWarrior product didn't support case-sensitive HFS+ until very recently. Why, I don't know since case-sensitive HFS+ simply omits the case-folding step before determining b-tree position. It's all documented in TN1150.
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You won't be too happy with it if you run MacOS X. There is too much code out there that doesn't expect case sensitivity (and too many users as well), and very very few applications are ever tested on a case sensitive file system.
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I have issues with Photoshop CS 2 but that is quite old so I can understand that, but I also had it with CS 3 beta (don't know about final), which is very lame.
I also have it with Warcraft III and thought I would have wanted Blizzard to fix it the game is old and atleas
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Blizzard still supports StarCraft on the Mac, and StarCraft is a heck of a lot older than Warcraft III. Therefore, I suggest submitting a bug report -- you might be pleasantly surprised.
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I've been running case-sensitive HFS+ as the root filesystem on some of my OS X systems for quite some time now, specifically to make sure that I don't write buggy code which uses differently cased filenames. I don't use a lot of third-party software so it works fine. The only thing I had trouble with was early betas of CodeWeaver's CrossOver and that was easily fixable by adding a symlink.
It should be noted that the story poster was looking for something to use as a shared-data drive, probably not a dr
FAT is it for now (Score:5, Interesting)
The easier and more important one is symbolic links. (Indeed, it ought to be possible to devise a "virtual symlink" system that would work pretty much independent of the underlying filesystem, by simply using hidden pointer files containing the paths to the target files -- similar to
The harder, but ultimately just as important, is journaling (similar to what ext3 does for ext2).
The advantage of extending FAT32 in this way should be obvious: just like with ext2/3, systems that don't support the extension can at least still access the data (although doing so may invalidate the journal). So you don't *lose* any compatibility, you only *gain* the added features. In situations where you *mostly* use the disk with a particular system (e.g., my data drive that spends basically 100% of its time mounted in FreeBSD, but is FAT32 so I can get to my data from a non-BSD system in case of an unforseen emergency), you'd get a lot of benefit from the improved features. (I'd be particularly pleased to have symlinks on my data drive, for instance.) Then you only lose the new features if you need to mount the disk under a system that doesn't support them, e.g., if some piece of hardware on my FreeBSD workstation dies and I need to get my files, I could take the drive and hook it up to just about any computer anywhere and mount it as plain old FAT32 and my files would all be there.
This still doesn't turn FAT into BeFS or ZFS or whatnot, but it would be a welcome improvement.
Your Problem doesnt have a solution buddy (Score:2, Insightful)
UDF (Score:3, Informative)
Shared storage, not shared drive (Score:5, Insightful)
I set up an old PC with Linux to solve many needs. NFS and Samba provide a common pool of storage for every OS that I use. Since setting that up, I haven't ever though about shared partitions. They aren't needed.
Linux and Samba worked for me, but that's not the only solution. A NAS box might work better for you. The point is that you need shared storage, not a shared drive. Every OS supports network storage. Every OS supports backups across the network.
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In summary: there is a real need for sharing a drive between different systems.
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You're thinking firmly inside the box.
Here's my scenario: I have OpenBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and OS X machines. (I don't do Windows, but I hear others do.) For backups I got a 350GB hard disk and a USB drive case. I'd like to format the disk so it can be mounted on all the systems so everything is backed up on that one disk. If there's an earthquake or fire, there's only one little box to grab. And obviously I'd like to be able to look at all my files from any platform. (All my machines are not on the sa
None of the above! (Score:2)
It also happens only a little bigger than most drive enclosures, and you get a cheap, quiet NAS. This or any similar Linux-capable system is well worth your time.
Forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern filesystems are complicated beasts. One tiny error can have catastrophic results. Native filesystem drivers are the results of many years of real-life testing by millions of users. Can you really believe a third-party filesystem driver to be solid enough to write on a foreign filesystem?
Read-only support is OK because it's a magnitude easier to implement, though.
The only viable solution to cross-OS filesystem usage (without crippling yourself to FAT32) is networking.
9p is all you need, it's only 15 y.o. (Score:2)
it's in the Linux kernel : v9fs
it's in Plan 9 From Bell labs (obviously)
it's in Unix clone userlands : plan9ports
it's in Inferno
it's in wmii
UFS / FFS (Score:3, Informative)
UFS/FFS (Score:2)
Ext2 support for Mac/OS X and Windows is... limited to say the least. It works, but if you're going to use Windows/Mac to copy files to your hard drive the majority of the time, you might prefer to stick with FAT32.
Ext2 is also not terribly robust. When mounted async, it has the old well known problem of data corruption should anything go wrong while writing data (power los
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Personally, I've got high hopes for UFS/FFS. Just about every operating system supports it in one form or another. Unfortunately, it seems nobody has bothered to get their implementations compatible with other implementations. So, while there is UFS/FFS support for Windows/OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX/etc. it's all in just a slightly different on-disk format, so it's not easy to get one to read another.
An example of compatibilty problems, UFS drives formatted on Solaris/Sparc are not readable by Solaris/x86 due to byte order in the data structures. Fortunately, Sun realized that mistake with ZFS - the byte order is determined by the machine that formatted the drive (zpool), but the ZFS driver will swap bytes if needed.
Yes, and its already been done... (Score:2)
Easily solved... and you didn't mention anything about security, so let me help. I wrote about it [gnu-designs.com] previously.
I've been moving more and more of my data off to TrueCrypt on Linux/Windows or GELI on the FreeBSD side to lock things down. So far, it works great.
Why is case-sensitivity so important? (Score:2)
and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+
And that issue is? Not having a Linux with HFS+ volume handy, I presume that the case insensitivity is handled in the VFS. The only times that case sensitivity has ever been an issue for me are 1) some joker decided it would be funny to name a couple of Linux kernel source files with the same name in different cases, and 2) when I try to rename a file using 'mv' to just change case with mv aliased to 'mv -i', mv thinks it's the same file and asks me to confirm.
#1 is just plain bad form to name files like
Many choices (Score:2)
Oh, you said Windows, never mind. Use a networked file system like SMB or FTP to send things from Windows to another machine or you could
How about ... (Score:2)
QEMU (Score:2)
It wasn't fast but ti was compatible.
Sam
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Get the job done. (Score:3, Insightful)
One important limitation of FAT32 (Score:3, Insightful)
Was discussed couple of years ago. (Score:3, Informative)
That was discussed couple of years ago and there were no solution found. I mean FAT32 is no solution - more of a problem. Albeit being read by most if not all OSs.
Many people in past had recommended for OS specific stuff to use ZIP archives (since they are also universally available). Additionally to preserve verbatim information from *nix/MacOS volumes you can create disk image (laying on FAT32 volume). All decent OSs allow you to mount such disk images. Formats are different so it is not portable solution to preserve not portable OS-specific information about files.
Just to reiterate FAT32 is more or less only such solution.
P.S. I have looked also into ext2 support. In MacOS 10.3.x there were no official drivers (nor such drivers materialized in 10.4). Second party solution (I found only one) crashed my MacOS during installation and didn't worked in the end. For Windows there are multiple working ext2 solutions. Though not nice, yet allowing you to extract your files from ext2 volume. Not fitting for usual everyday work - but passable.
Re:Quick answer: No (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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There are read-only implementations for ReiserFS (v3) available for Windows and FreeBSD.
A small NAS might be suffice too. Everyone speaks CIFS/NFS these days.
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That driver has been around for literally years now. I asked the author about journalling, and he basically said it was too much of a pain to port, so it wouldn't be happening.
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There is no problem what so ever accessing an ext2/3 partition or disk from XP, it's just not journaling when writing.
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Note to self: must buy new motherboard battery one day
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Re:Have any of you read the post you are replying (Score:2)
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Mods on crack again?? (Score:2)
Re:Have any of you read the post you are replying (Score:2)
Personally, I just set up a "server" that shares drives by SAMBA. Then there's not as many problems sharing the actual files between platforms.
Re:Have any of you read the post you are replying (Score:2)
Ohh... sorry, I didn't read the question. What the HELL was I thinking. OMG, Pink ponies! Look at the purty colors!
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LoB
Re:Maybe ext2? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why not just use ext2? (Score:5, Informative)
FAT is really the only viable option at the moment. The problem there is that you will be limited to files 2GB in size. Have a DVD image you want to access from all three platforms? Forget it. You'll either have to burn it to a DVD or use FTP, because SAMBA is limited by the same 2GB limit.
Someone else posted a response about using UDF. I'll have to look into that, but I'm not sure OS X or Windows will format a hard drive to UDF. Well, at least not with OS X's "Disk Utility" application.
Re:With Today's Drive Capacities, Why Not Partitio (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an external USB hard drive and recently formatted the hard drive with two different partitions. The first partition is formatted as NTFS and the second is formatted as JFS. The NTFS partition is mainly for Windows, but can also be used for transferring files between Linux and Windows. The JFS partition is only for being used by Linux. When using Linux, I can now make backup copies of stuff from my main Linux partitions onto the exteral drive's JFS partition using the rsync command. Perhaps I am