format-udf

The note about the partition table makes me wonder how he was formatting the drive. https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf specifically does some partition table related hacks to make UDF maximally compatible with different platforms.

Using exFAT under macOS over a period of a few years led to several of my drives becoming corrupted. I have not had issues since I switched away from exFAT, and I am now convinced that macOS's exFAT driver is unacceptably terrible. If you need a multiplatform filesystem for a thumb drive or small portable hard drive, I have had success with UDF. Surprisingly so, given that it's basically a hack. See: https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf. This basically won't work on drives over 2TB, however.

I recall getting UDF cross compatibility required a bit of non-trivial work[0], did this improve recently? [0] https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf

> can't start shipping SD cards formatted with btrfs until Windows supports it out of the box 3rd parties can write drivers for Windows, you know. A small, read-only FAT partition on a USB stick or SD card could contain the installable drivers necessary to read/write the rest of the disk. However, that's unnecessary. The best option for a universal file system is UDF. Windows, Mac, and Linux all have full read/write support. See: https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf

A sibling comment linked https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf which claims that it creates a whole-device FS which works across all 3.

There are several platform specific gotchas with UDF. If you want to use UDF on a drive, I suggest using the script at https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf. It takes into account the platform specific gotchas and formats a drive properly to be usable across Windows, Linux and macOS.

> because I don’t know how else to have a cross-platform filesystem without a stupidly-low file-size limit UDF is natively supported on all major OS. I haven't used it in macOS but on paper macOS seems to be having even better support for it than Linux so you can give it a shot. Lastly, you can use https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf for creating most compatible filesystem across different devices.

ISO 13346[0] is supported everywhere and can handle files larger than 4GB. It's used on DVDs, but it can also be used on a flash drive[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format [1] https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf

You can also use UDF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format) for inter-op between Linux and Windows. Here is a Linux script to format a drive as UDF so it is usable with both Linux and Windows: https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf/blob/master/format-u... 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.