[ale] Cross Platform File Systems (was re: external hard drive)

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 01/28/2010 02:51 PM, m-aaron-r wrote:
> I now have several hundred gigs of DV.mov video files on
> external hard drives in native Mac OSeX file format.  I need
> to copy these gigs onto an empty (blank) TB SATA drive
> provided by one of the other animation artists on the project
> (the one who stored all the video tapes for all these years).
> Unfortunately, he is a windisease victim, so I really need to
> use NTFS for him, given that most of these files are at least
> 10GB in size.
>
> First hurdle was that all of my (many) external Firewire drive
> cases are designed for IDE (PATA) drives. Fortunately I also
> have a little open cable device that interfaces USB 2.0 to SATA
> drives that includes the needed power supply adaptor.
>
> Even with both Mac and Linux at my disposal, the process of
> testing the drive, formatting it with the NTFS file system and
> copying the files has been very problematic.
>
> Native Mac OSeX does not support NTFS for writing or disk
> formatting, though it will mount NTFS as Read Only.  Linux
> NTFS support is native now, though enabling NTFS write
> support requires a couple extra steps with Ubuntu.

I'm not sure how hard it is to use FUSE in OS X.  However, every option 
I am aware of depends on it.

You can use NTFS, which on FUSE systems can be used with the NTFS 3G 
driver, or you can use ext2 (or ext3, but not ext4) which there are also 
FUSE drivers for (which is for OS X's benefit) and installable 
filesystems for Windows.  Do take care with ext3, the FUSE and Windows 
IFS drivers do not, last I was aware, know how to deal with the ext3 
journal.  You're probably better off using ext2 with large file support.

Also, the easiest way is the command line.  For NTFS use MBR partition 
type 0x07.  For ext2/3, of course, use the normal partition type.

mkntfs can create a NTFS filesystem that is readable by everything 
that's Windows XP and newer.

> I did look into FUSE for Mac OSeX, but the installation
> and implementation did NOT look to be trivial -- at least
> not as trivial as I wanted it to be in terms of time and effort
> for a one time need.  Has anyone here successfully
> installed FUSE on an OSeX system??
>
> As a recommendation for anyone needing a cross platform
> file system, I would say the most functional choice is to go
> with the Mac OSeX native HFS file system, then repair the
> defective windisease system(s) that need to access the
> drive with something like FUSE.  There are also low cost
> proprietary products for reading HFS under Windisease,
> but I haven't looked at these since the Xcrement Pile days
> and can't say if they are available for newer versions of
> Windisease.

The truly portable method would seem to be UDF on BluRay media, of 
course that depends on having a BD drive.  Of course, the limit is 50 GB 
if you go that route.

The only other way that I can think of to do it, is to use FAT32 and 
split the files into chunks of either 1.9 GB or 3.9 GB, depending on the 
limit that *Windows* enforces.  Windows may only use a 2 GB limit, much 
like it only permits you to create a 32 GB filesystem with FAT32 even 
though that is a purely arbitrary limit.

The upshot is that you can then use a simple "cat" to put the files 
together on the Windows system.  Not transparent, but not 
insurmountable, either.

	--- Mike

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                    Blog: http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1                            Email: mike at trausch.us