Ever since you started using more than one OS you knew the inherent problems of exchanging data between different OSs. Unless you transfer everything via network, you will have to make a choice regarding the filesystem on a removable drive.
For this post we consider the common scenario of wanting to move files between Linux, Mac OS and Windows. If you consider only a subset of these you might get away with other filesystems as well. Each filesystem you choose will have a number of limitations. Some might be read-only in one or two of the destination OSs, others might have limits on the filesize (4GB anyone?) and yet others might require you to install closed-sourced commercial software to use them.
Up until recently, I would use FAT32 to exchange files (or backups) between devices. This worked reasonably well, but in 2014 you can expect to have a number of files which exceed FAT32s 4GB limit on filesize. Only think about Virtual Machine images!
Recently, I stumbled on a surprisingly simple solution for my problem: UDF! Everybody knows and supports UDF (Universal Disk Format) because it’s the filesystem used on DVDs etc. Reading about UDF, it’s also the filesystem for DVD-RAM (a relic disk format which could be used to create incremental backups by burning them to a DVD disk). I never thought about it, but UDF can also be used as a filesystem for read-write media, and current operating systems support it just fine. To top it of, UDF is both case-sensitive and case-preserving and has POSIX file permissions, not something to take for granted even with modern filesystems. A tabular feature comparison between UDF, NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT can be found in the Windows Dev Center.
Now, this is the tricky part, and the one where your mileage might vary wildly. Please contact me with any improvements on these steps. For this I’m assuming that I have a Linux host to create the UDF filesystem and a Mac OS X host to use it with.
On Linux, install mkudffs (package udftools). Insert the drive you want to format using UDF (sdb in our example).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1
sync
mkudffs --blocksize=512 --media-type=hd /dev/sdb
syncThen insert the new drive into your Mac OS machine. It will be mounted as “LinuxUDF”. You can then simply rename the drive.
If you use a removable drive on a Mac OS machine frequently (or permanently) it would be nice to mount it at a fixed location rather than under /Volume/drivename. Mac OS still has an fstab-mechanism, but the way to edit the file differs from Linux. Also, since our UDF does not have a UUID, we will to identify it using a label, so make sure to give a unique name to each of your UDF-formatted drives.
Eject the UDF drive you renamed in the earlier step. Open the Terminal and start vifs:
sudo vifsAdd a line like this to the empty fstab file:
LABEL=JF64GB /Users/jojo/mnt/jf64gb udf rw,autoWhen you insert the drive into your Mac, it will auto-mount at the given mountpoint. It will still show up as a removable drive on your desktop, and you can still eject it like you did before.
First of all, I haven’t actually tested whether the UDF drive I created also works on Windows. But given the age and pervasion of the UDF standard, I’d be inclined to chalk it up to Windows if it didn’t work.
My biggest concern with this setup is that there currently is no Open Source platform-interoperable way to do full-disk encryption (FDE). Ever since Truecrypt shut down, there isn’t even a way to do it between Mac OS and Linux, though both have very mature FDE solutions builtin. You could use encfs which is a FUSE-based filesystem which encrypts both the content and the filenames (but leaves the directory structure visible). encfs is availabe in most Linux distributions and in homebrew.
I’ve since experienced a scenario where a UDF-drive on my Linux machine exhibited some really strange behaviour during writes (via rsync for example), resulting in a 100% CPU load of the process doing the writing. Since I did not have the time to investigate I simply switched that disk back to ext4 for now.
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