Currently I hold a collection of everything related to my whole family and our history because I’m the only one who know fuckall about computers. The collection is a massive shitload of multiple decades worth of photographs and videos.I want make multiple copies of collection on multiple drives and store them at different sites so nothing in lost in case of fire or flood, and in case of my death I want my family to be able to open it.

I am a full time gnu-linux user but everyone else uses either Windows or OSX. So naturally I was looking for a format for these drives that would be readable by all OS’s, and found that recently EXFAT had it’s patent expire or something so now it’s natively readable by gnu-linux, and I own another 1TB drive that came preformatted as EXFAT so I sorta knew it existed, but when I looked on this sub I found this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12sfbwt/is_formatting_a_hard_drive_to_exfat_32_safe/ plus other things which basically told me

  • EXFAT is not good for drives that are multiple TBs, as it ends up with fragmentation issues. This issue gets worse if your working with a lot of files or big files. (I’m working with both.)

  • EXFAT has an issue with corruption, which can be extra bad if a cable is bumped while in use or there is a power issue, where you can get the whole filesystem corrupted. And it gets worse if you’re working with a lot of files or big files. (And again, that’s exactly what I’m doing.)

So it seems like instead of being exactly what would be the solution to my problem, EXFAT is actually a pretty terrible format for my situation. What are my other options here? I am kinda stumped.

If only Apple and MS would adopt EXT4…

  • dr100@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    exFAT will work just fine for pictures and videos, it’s stuff like databases or maildir (saving the emails one email=one file) or other similar workloads that are the problem. Also it’ll disable write cache usually and you could just yank the drive.

    I’d keep all “working drives”, the ones that are used mostly as an internal drive even if external (a block device is a block device despite some people here needing a fainting couch when they read the letters “USB”). Everything for backups, to be used between multiple persons or computers I’d do exFAT. Mostly because it’s MISSING the following (from annoying to dangerous to disastrous): permissions, junctions (links) and EFS.