NTFS vs. ext3 sharing was{Re: do I need to format this new external drive

[NoOp]

On 01/15/2008 08:32 AM, anthony baldwin wrote:
> NoOp wrote:
>> On 01/14/2008 06:19 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>> 
>>> Depends. Do you want to preserve things like permissions when copying
>>> onto the drive?
>>>
>>> If it's >2GB, it won't be FAT16, it will be FAT32, which is actually a
>>> reasonably efficient, fast FS with good long name support. You can
>>> back up onto it using DAR, say. Leaving it FAT32 will mean that it's
>>> also accessible from Windows, a Mac or almost anything else, which
>>> might be an advantage.
>> 
>> Unless of course you want to save files larger than 4Gb (such as an
>> Ubuntu DVD). In that case you'll want to use NTFS instead.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs
>> 
>> 
> 
> Too late, it's already ext3...
> Is there really a limit to the size of file I can save on it now?
> (Of course, 4gb is pretty big...)
> 
> Do I understand correctly that it may have been easier to set up sharing 
> of such the external drive and the 150 gb storage partition on my hdd
> between the two distros had I formatted them as NTFS?
> 
> /tony
> 

No... I was replying to Liam's suggestion for FAT32 for accesability
from Windows & MAC. In that case I recommend NTFS, as FAT32 has a 4GB
file size limitation (google/wikipedia is your friend, as are these
archives where I was having a problem saving a DVD greater than 4GB on a
FAT32 drive).

You can r/w to an ext3 with Windows, but in Windows you need to install
something like ex2ifs: http://www.fs-driver.org/ in order to read/write
to the ext3 drive. I suppose that there may be something similar for
older MAC's, but I've no experience with MAC.