Best filesystem for external harddrive?
I have an external harddrive (IDE harddrive + enclosure) that I use to backup my internal harddrive. I originally decided to format it in FAT.
Overall, I'm satisfied with my backup mechanism, but it's not perfect. My major gripe is that FAT doesn't recognize Unix filenames like .vimrc, which I need to copy to _vimrc if I want to back them up.
I've pretty much decided that I will never use Windows again, so there's no reason for me to use FAT any longer. However, I still want to leave the door open for a future migration to Linux or FreeBSD, should Apple do something suprising and dramatic to lose my business (exaggerated extreme example: disabling MP3 support in iTunes).
Give the fact that I want to maintain a Unix filesystem on my external media, which filesystem do you suggest that I use? Disk Utility.app has something called a "Unix filesystem" but it doesn't ellaborate as to which filesystem it is. Is it ext2, ext3, raiser, etc?
Overall, I'm satisfied with my backup mechanism, but it's not perfect. My major gripe is that FAT doesn't recognize Unix filenames like .vimrc, which I need to copy to _vimrc if I want to back them up.
I've pretty much decided that I will never use Windows again, so there's no reason for me to use FAT any longer. However, I still want to leave the door open for a future migration to Linux or FreeBSD, should Apple do something suprising and dramatic to lose my business (exaggerated extreme example: disabling MP3 support in iTunes).
Give the fact that I want to maintain a Unix filesystem on my external media, which filesystem do you suggest that I use? Disk Utility.app has something called a "Unix filesystem" but it doesn't ellaborate as to which filesystem it is. Is it ext2, ext3, raiser, etc?
Comments
There are no ext2 (ext3 is backwards compatible,) drivers for OS X yet, so I haven't a clue what the 'UNIX' format is.
If Tiger... then you can format it as HFS+ and use the Linux driver for that.