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.
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
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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.)
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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...
I accidentally left a CD with a bunch of photos on it from 2005 in a shed outside until 2022 and when I mounted it, it ran great. I got back a bunch of photos from 2005 that I thought were lost. That shed gets hot as fuck during summer and then our Maine winters as famously harsh.
I was surprised the weather didn't kill the CD so as an experiment I burned a bunch of memes onto a CD and buried it in a plastic food container. I let it stay there a year and allowed the deep frost of winter to get to it. I dug it up a year later and it was fine.
So this is just a sample size of 2 but to me it seems normal everyday CDs are actually pretty tough and stable, even through brutal temperature changes and wet or frozen weather.