Universal File System

I have an external hard drive I'd like to be able to mount read/write on windows/os x, and linux without a problem.

This drive up until now has been HFS+ and I had a problem with it being corrupt ever time i'd reboot ubuntu without shutting down every app using the drive and unmounting.

I'm going to format this drive, but i'd like to format it to a map and file system compatible with all 3 operating systems.

Is this exFAT?

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1 Answer

• FAT32 can be read by Linux, Windows and MacOS. There are drawbacks with it, for example the maximum file size 4 GiB, and there is no journaling, but FAT32 is what I would recommend in this case.
• NTFS is a good alternative for sharing between Linux and Windows, but I don't think MacOS likes it.
• Linux file systems do not work in Windows. As pointed out by @muru, it is possible to install ext2fsd drivers into Windows and get decent read support for ext file systems (ext2, ext3, ext4).
• UDF, Universal Disk Format, might be an alternative, but it lacks important tools, for example repair tools.
• EXFAT is a Microsoft proprietary file system, and you must install extra tools in order to use it in Linux. I guess there is a problem with MacOS too.

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