Because Apple systems are non-expandable, I usually store my large data on external drives (USB, NAS, etc). Any idea if APFS will work on them, either direct connect or iSCSI?
USB devices can definitely be formatted with APFS, since they did that on-stage during the demo.
I'm less sure about iSCSI targets, but iSCSI is a block-storage protocol. If you can format an iSCSI volume with HFS+ today, you'll probably be able to format it with APFS tomorrow.
File system is usually independent from storage media, with some exceptions
(and I would kind of avoid formatting external drives in "funny" FSs as I might want to read them in some other OSs. Unfortunately this usually means FAT32)
But I do have external media as HFS to work with Time Machine
For what it's worth, there's NTFS drivers for Linux and OS X (ntfs-3g). NTFS often gets a mixed reception, but regardless of your opinion of it, it's still massively better than FAT32.
Another option is ext3. The only caveat there is the Windows ext drivers don't fully support ext3 (unless I've missed an announcement). However they do fully support ext2 and ext3 is backwards compatible so you can effective get ext3 support in Windows.
Sadly though, all the good stuff requires 3rd party libraries. It's a real pity everyone can't agree on a standard to replace FAT32. :(
> It's a real pity everyone can't agree on a standard to replace FAT32. :(
Every OS in the universe supports UDF now, and its the only real ubiquitous non-proprietary filesystem. I use it on all external storage that I cannot guarantee will be touching Linux machines exclusively.
I've been using NTFS on USB sticks and external drivers for over 5 years when using Linux / Windows mixed use. No problems so far. This of course wouldn't mean it's problem free or 'rock solid', but in normal daily use I haven't encountered any. Why? Because meta data journaling. exFAT works as well, but it doesn't journal -> less reliable.
UDF works well for thumb drives that are large enough that you might want to copy a file to the thumb drive that exceeds the max file size of a FAT filesystem.
exFAT was supposed to be the new standard. But Microsoft went a little crazy with patents and license restrictions. As a result it's about as popular as JPEG2000.
It's actually a shame. A better file system for removable devices was a huge opportunity for an open standard.
Ideally they could have released a filesystem that was backwards (read at least) compatible. Large files could show up as multipart files when viewed as FAT32.
Is NTFS support good enough for writing? I haven't kept up. At one time you could read NTFS on Linux well enough, but writing was not supported (or was "experimental") I think mostly because the permissions attributes were quite different from the Unix approach? And also because it was reverse-engineered and not officially endorsed by MS?
Did Microsoft ever open-source the NTFS specs and drivers?
There were a few NTFS drivers for Linux. The native ones didn't support writing, but the ntfs-3g drivers I recommended do. ntfs-3g runs on FUSE, so it's not a native kernel driver, but honestly the slowdown from running in FUSE is hardly noticeable and they've been stable for at least 10 years. So you shouldn't have any issues running ntfs-3g.
I don't know the answers to your other questions. Sorry.
Shouldn't have any issues, but don't treat it as rock-solid either. About 5 years ago ntfs-3g made a pretty big folder of mine simply disappear. To the point that when I tried a dozen recovery tools, only two of them could even see the files.
To be fair, even the most battle tested of file systems can run into occasional glitches like this when running on consumer hardware. So on any sufficiently large forum, you'll always find a few members that have experienced data loss at some point on an otherwise agreed to be stable file system driver. But for what it's worth, I've been using ntfs-3g for about 15 years and never had a single issue with it. So as much as I do sympathise with your pain, it's definitely more an edge case than the norm.
Yes, writing was the problem, not sure how good it is today
Since my main usage for external media was big files (you know, the ones with extension mov, mpg, avi, etc) using FAT32 was not a big issue (unless it was bigger than 4GB of course)
> I know there was a way to write to ntfs from Linux, but it required to install ntfs driver file from Windows.
That isn't true. You need to use ntfs-3g, which is a free software implementation of NTFS (that allows both reading and writing). It's been stable for 10 years. Using NTFS doesn't require anything from windows and doesn't require proprietary software.
I just downloaded the source for ntfs-3g[1], and it doesn't appear to have any binary blobs in it. In addition, it's under the GPLv2 so integrating proprietary components is unlikely to be legal. The answer you linked quite clearly says that the company offers a proprietary version of ntfs-3g. The answer does not say that ntfs-3g is proprietary.
Also, Trisquel (an FSF-approved GNU/Linux distribtion, meaning that it doesn't have any proprietary software within 100km of the distro) has packages for ntfs-3g[2]. So it's _definitely_ entirely free software.
So again, you're wrong on this point. In addition, I strongly believe that you were never correct on this point. Maybe you confused ntfs-3g with the proprietary version that company sells?
