Filesystem of choice for a Linux/FreeBSD shared backup disk?

[andrew clarke]

On Tue 2008-09-23 17:17:21 UTC+0200, Andreas Davour (ante at Update.UU.SE) wrote:

> I've bought a usb connected disk to use as backup, and I've been  
> thinking about trying to make the data as available as possible. Do  
> anyone here have any suggestion about what kind of filesystem would be  
> best to use? Can ufs2 be read by linux? It looks like it from my short  
> persual of google hits, but it also looks kind of complicated. IS ext2 a  
> safer bet? Anything totally different?
>
> Any filesystem that can handle data from both BSD and Linux without too  
> much metadata mangling would do.

I'm not sure about UFS support in Linux.  You would probably need to
ask on a Linux list.  The man page for newfs says that you can create
UFS1 filesystems with it, which may help with compatibility?

mount_ext2fs is available in FreeBSD but I can't speak for its
reliability.

There is full read/write support for NTFS provided by
sysutils/fusefs-ntfs in the Ports tree.  I suspect there are some
limitations though, eg. tighter restrictions than UFS on what
characters are permitted in filenames.

For making backups I would probably just use FAT32 and tar, because
practically anything (not just FreeBSD & Linux) will mount FAT32 file
systems, and tar should respect your file attributes (owner, group,
creation timestamp, last modified timestamp, etc).