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

[Mike Jeays]

I have an EXT2 USB flash drive on a FreeBSD system, and it works perfectly.  
I have also used EXT2 filesystems on IDE drives in a USB caddy, and they work 
fine as well.

On September 23, 2008 04:19:06 pm andrew clarke wrote:
> 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).
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-- 
Mike Jeays
http://www.jeays.ca