What's better than EXFAT formatting for a drive to be readable on any OS in case of my death?

Currently I hold a collection of everything related to my whole family and our history because I'm the only one who know fuckall about computers. The collection is a massive shitload of multiple decades worth of photographs and videos.I want make multiple copies of collection on multiple drives and store them at different sites so nothing in lost in case of fire or flood, and in case of my death I want my family to be able to open it.

I am a full time gnu-linux user but everyone else uses either Windows or OSX. So naturally I was looking for a format for these drives that would be readable by all OS's, and found that recently EXFAT had it's patent expire or something so now it's natively readable by gnu-linux, and I own another 1TB drive that came preformatted as EXFAT so I sorta knew it existed, but when I looked on this sub I found this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12sfbwt/is_formatting_a_hard_drive_to_exfat_32_safe/ plus other things which basically told me

EXFAT is not good for drives that are multiple TBs, as it ends up with fragmentation issues. This issue gets worse if your working with a lot of files or big files. (I'm working with both.)
EXFAT has an issue with corruption, which can be extra bad if a cable is bumped while in use or there is a power issue, where you can get the whole filesystem corrupted. And it gets worse if you're working with a lot of files or big files. (And again, that's exactly what I'm doing.)

So it seems like instead of being exactly what would be the solution to my problem, EXFAT is actually a pretty terrible format for my situation. What are my other options here? I am kinda stumped.

If only Apple and MS would adopt EXT4...

11 comments

Great thread topic, thanks, I hadn’t heard about these issues.
Any particular reason you’re not immediately jumping to NTFS? Considering your concern around tech illiterate family members, any non standard formats may cause issue.
Given it's for your death, why not have multiple copies in multiple formats? For for Mac, one in ext4 and one in NTFS? Youd have multiple copies of your will so why not this.
exFAT will work just fine for pictures and videos, it's stuff like databases or maildir (saving the emails one email=one file) or other similar workloads that are the problem. Also it'll disable write cache usually and you could just yank the drive.

I'd keep all "working drives", the ones that are used mostly as an internal drive even if external (a block device is a block device despite some people here needing a fainting couch when they read the letters "USB"). Everything for backups, to be used between multiple persons or computers I'd do exFAT. Mostly because it's MISSING the following (from annoying to dangerous to disastrous): permissions, junctions (links) and EFS.
If I remember right, osx has native support for reading only NTFS disks, and it's not the other way around (windows doesn't support hfs+ or apfs, not even reading). I'm in a similar situation, I have multiple copies on different formats, but the main data is on a ntfs
What you could do instead is write down idiot proof guides on how to access things from mac and windows, write down passwords, tell them how to access ntfs from Mac and vice versa etc.

It’s what I’m doing. Only bad thing is that you have to update it every once in a a while because things change.
3 options:

EXT4 (works in other OSs with aditional software)

NTFS (works in other operative systems)

ExFAT (works in other operative systems)
Consider UDFS as Windows can format partitions/disks using the UDF file system but you can only do it via the command line, you can then read and write to it as you would to a normal disk, I believe Linux and Mac's can access it just as easily as long as you don't set the version too high and it is common to all three OS's.

e.g.

FORMAT volume [/FS:file-system] [/V:label] [/Q] [/A:size] [/C] [/X] [/P:passes] [/S:state] /FS:filesystem Specifies the type of the file system (FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, or UDF).

/R:revision UDF only: Forces the format to a specific UDF version (1.02, 1.50, 2.00, 2.01, 2.50). The default revision is 2.01.

/D UDF 2.50 only: Metadata will be duplicated.
If only Apple and MS would adopt EXT4...

take it the other way around - NTFS is supported on pretty much everything. Linux, BSD (dont know about MacOS), and of course Windows. right now, i use it as a "bridge" filesystem to exchange data between different OSes. open source drivers reached the state of development, that they work well. so i'd say - ditch exFAT and stick to NTFS.
- So if I go into Gparted format these things NTFS, any modern OSX machine can read/write them? Your "bridge" idea is exactly what I want but when I Google it the results advertise software to download and install on OSX that makes it work with NTFS.
  
  I really wouldn't know since I've not touched OSX in over a decade.
Multiple copies. All formatted ext4. I say this because there will always be an OS capable of reading it that can be freely downloaded.

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