I'm more upset there are no filesystems where I can organize files by applying labels to them, similar to how one can apply labels to email in Gmail.
You can do this on a mac (Finder labels are stored in HFS+ metadata).
Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
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Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#32I'm more upset there are no filesystems where I can organize files by applying labels to them, similar to how one can apply labels to email in Gmail.
Not quite sure if you really want that: open your favorite shell, and count the number of files in your data directory; then multiply it by, say, 2 seconds each -would you like to spend that time on organization, or rather making money? (obviously you can apply the same label to multiple files, but you still need to figure out what belongs to where).
Personally, I gave up on manual organization of my file system last year, and learned how to love built-in search. This works great, as the rough index is in your head anyways, so you can just take a single token of the filename, type it in, and open it up; massively reducing both access time, and eliminating organization entirely.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#33exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…
I wouldn't trust any data I particularly cared about to exFAT. Its a non journaled file system with only a single FAT and free space bitmap in most implementations. i.e. its fairly easy to corrupt and very difficult to recover.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#34I use a small console-only install of VirtualBox and use Samba to communicate back with Windows. I think I only have it using 1 cpu and 256 MB memory. I can easily run Autocad or Solidworks in the foreground.
I find that I only lose about 5% efficiency compared to booting up Linux and copying without overhead.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#35I think the real, but unhelpful answer is "supply and demand". Most filesystems are used by only one operating system at a time. If two operating systems need to share files, they're usually on different machines, so it's simpler to copy the files or provide a network interface to them, rather than share disk-level access. Getting different OS makers to standardize (and therefore slow innovation) on something as perf…
provide a network interface to them
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#36As others have mentioned, the cost of standardizing file-systems across OSes does not seem worth it. But, is there any way to define a standard interface so that a filesystem driver written for 1 OS can be easily ported to another. Similar to how NVidia ships the same binary blob regardless of the OS. We even have ndisswrapper, which can run many Windows wireless drivers on Linux without modifying the binary.
We will obviously run into issues where different OSes have different concepts of what the filesystem needs to do (such as differing security models), but at the very least we should be able to get the common interfaces standardized.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#37I think the author's use case is actually quite rare these days. I personally don't dual boot any more, much preferring to run other OSes in a virtual machine. Then I don't care what filesystems they use internally, all shared data is shared via the VM's interface anyway. I think that's the way of the future, not cross-platform filesystems.
I still duel boot, because I still can't stand the overhead of VMs. However, the tasks I need to do on Windows don't overlap with Linux, so it is not a problem, and Linux support for NTFS seems to be good enough (otherwise I could still make a deticated share partition in FAT.)
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#38exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data. There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/what…
[Anecdote] Seagate and ExFAT; I will avoid these two till the day I die.
I've had at least 3 (I'm not sure, maybe more) Seagate internal HDDs failed on me in the past several years (I don't do anything remotely crazy with my MacBook Pro or other machines). And I've had a 1TB external HDD and 3 USB disks ruined by ExFAT (yes, I always 'eject' the volume before yanking in out from USB port).
I don't know what the hell is wrong with either of them - Maybe I've been unlucky. But that's the truth, and I'm sure the problem wasn't from my side.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#39A friend of mine uses ZFS on OS X. Apparently it works quite well. I imagine Linux support is good too, but I'm not sure about Windows. At any rate, I'm surprised the author didn't mention it.
Re: Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?
#40Look how most cross platform GUI toolkits turned out :/