alt Hacker News> I wish exFAT would die in a fire and a journaling filesystem would replace it as the "one filesystem you can use everywhere"
Where exactly is everywhere? Win32? All of Linux? BSDs? MacOS? IOS? ...
Replies
tombert • today at 7:19 AM
Everywhere exFAT is supported now. Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD would be fine.
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ghrl • today at 6:11 AM
Something MacOS and Windows support natively would be a good start, it could grow from there.
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Everywhere in the sense of "I have a USB stick/SD card, what do I format it to so that every major device I'm using can read it".
In practice, every OS has its preferred system and the rest has varying levels of "I guess this works", with FAT32 and exFAT being the only real cross-platform options.
To wit:
* NTFS is only really properly and fully supported on Windows. Apple mounts it read-only. Linux can certainly mount NTFS and do some basic reads and writes. Unfortunately for whatever reason, the Linux fsck tools for NTFS are absolutely terrible, poorly designed and generally can't fix even the most basic of issues. At the same time, mount refuses to work with a partially corrupted filesystem, so if you're dealing with dirty unmounts (where the worst case usually is some unclosed file handle rather than data loss, but this also happens if you try to mount a suspended Windows parititon, which isn't uncommon since Windows hibernates by default and calls it fast boot), that's a boot to Windows just to fix it.
* Apple filesystems basically only work on apple devices. It's technically possible to mount them on Linux, but you end up digging into the guts of a bunch of stuff that Apple usually just masks for you.
* ext4 is only properly read/write under Linux and requires external drivers under Windows (which may not work properly either, as corruption issues are common).
FAT32 is reliable in that any OS can fsck/chkdsk it and properly mount it without needing special drivers, but is hindered by ancient filesize limitations. exFAT, at least for most cases, is the only filesystem you can plug into most devices and expect more or less the same capabilities as FAT32 (read/write support, can fix filesystem corruption.)
Out of the os specific ones, NTFS seems like it has the most potential to be the one filesystem that works everywhere; it's modern, works good-ish on most devices, it's just that the fsck/chkdsk tooling is awful outside of Windows.