I want to share an external 2TB USB hard drive for backup data between my personal Mac and my work laptop which run Ubuntu.
I need to be able to read/write with both OS, even if I will use it mostly with my Mac.
I tried with exFAT but, on Ubuntu, I'm getting an error message when I try paste a file on, and with HDF+ it doesn't even let me.
What's the best file system I can use in this case?
EDIT: I didn't tried NTFS, I read it's unreliable to be used on Mac and Linux, the backup on this hard drive is quite important to me.
34 Answers
Formatting in exFAT
Mac's and Ubuntu 20.10 and above, work well with exFAT.
Ubuntu 20.04 and less require the addition of exFAT support:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update
sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utilsThis worked well for me, exFAT drives now mount as soon as plugged in.
I have many files over 4GB so FAT32's limit does not work for me.
Upgrading Kernel
Kernel 5.4 and later can access the exFAT file system. A simple upgrade is probably better than a bandage.
NTFS works fine with Ubuntu but not with a MAC.
3From my experience, NTFS is very reliable on Linux, and there are reliable NTFS drivers for Mac to allow writing. These are not free, but not expensive either.
HFS+ can be re-mounted read/write in Ubuntu, but it is not well tested, and you will probably have to fix the ownership/permissions.
ExFAT should also work well now, even though it is a much simpler filesystem than the other 2. For simple backups of documents, that should work well.
If it's for more thorough backups, you may need to use the native filesystem anyway to preserve ownership and permissions.
If you're going with Mac compatibility and not any other compatibility beyond Mac and Ubuntu, your options really are just exceptionally limited:
- HFS
- HFS+
- FAT32
HFS support does not exist out of the box on Linux, but you can get it easily on Ubuntu.
HFS or HFS+
HFS or HFS+ is what you're going to want to use - it's the Mac compatible disk format, and has limited UNIX permissions so it works okay with Linux.
HFS+ is a newer version of HFS is all, but they are not the same so there's two different filesystem standards for them.
You'll need to install hfsutils for HFS or hfsprogs for HFS+ on your work laptop. Unless you don't have superuser access, which limits us even further.
FAT32: A fallback for all OSes
If you do not have superuser on your work laptop, then your only fallbacks guaranteed to work will be the FAT32 filesystem which is universally readable. It limits however how much you want to store and the largest file size it can support (4GB).
1I have used both FAT32 and ExFAT/NTFS to backup files on 128 GB microSD cards and Flash drives to/from Mac OS including Big Sur and Ubuntu 20.04 for the past year, making backups 2-3 times a week utilizing USB ports on the Mac, and Lenovo laptop's USB ports and/or built-in SD card reader.
Both formats are quite capable, however until Linux really provides good ExFAT recovery tools, I'd stick with the FAT32 file system.
It's critical to verify your media on your 2 TB drive to make sure it's not counterfeit, though this is more a problem of late with flash memory,it could happen with hard disks, too.
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