this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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What's better than EXFAT formatting for a drive to be readable on any OS in case of my death? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If only Apple and MS would adopt EXT4...

take it the other way around - NTFS is supported on pretty much everything. Linux, BSD (dont know about MacOS), and of course Windows. right now, i use it as a "bridge" filesystem to exchange data between different OSes. open source drivers reached the state of development, that they work well. so i'd say - ditch exFAT and stick to NTFS.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

So if I go into Gparted format these things NTFS, any modern OSX machine can read/write them? Your "bridge" idea is exactly what I want but when I Google it the results advertise software to download and install on OSX that makes it work with NTFS.

I really wouldn't know since I've not touched OSX in over a decade.