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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

What is special about exfat? I see it’s a variant of FAT32 that allows for more than 4GB, and is mainly for creating USBs? Does this mean it will improve interop with Windows?

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No, what's special about exfat is that it will improve interoperability with embedded devices like digital cameras. Many embedded devices which use SD cards or similar understand only FAT32 (for smaller cards) or exFAT (for larger cards).

ExFAT is the standard file system on SDXC cards. And it is patented. So it is both very relevant and encumbered.

Linux could already interop with Windows via ntfs-3g. EXFAT is great for interop with both Windows and macOS on the same filesystem, as well as interop with digital camera storage.

You should prefer a different filesystem if possible, though. EXFAT lacks features like journaling that protect against corruption. But EXFAT support is great for when you don't have a choice.

One special thing about exfat is that when it gets corrupted you are screwed.

In difference to ... ?

And adding to what guerrilla said, it seems to end up bad more easily than fat32, at least in my experience. I only have anecdata for this, but old files appearing as 0 bytes, filesystems that decide they won't mount again, things that I've only had and seen on other people's systems with exfat.

filesystems with redundant superblocks and journals? that is most modern ones I think

Most file systems use journaling[1], which allows you to recover from corruption. Some use copy-on-write[2]--most prominently zfs, but also btrfs and, more recently, bcachefs--which almost entirely prevents corruption in the first place.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write#In_computer_stor...

I use it when I need to move large files on usb between linux, win and macos since ntfs support on macos is such a nightmare.

Yes, specially since it was contributed by Microsoft and Samsung.

It's the most advanced file system that's supported on all major desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac). Linux is only catching up here. So it's becoming the ideal file system for USB sticks. Even if you just care about Windows and Linux, NTFS is not a safe option to share data. I've had too many issues with the available drivers for Linux.

Even if you are just sharing between Linux computers, ext2 is no good option, because of uid/gid values being inconsistent between computers. ext2 wasn't made with this use case in mind.

Lots of consumer electronics already support it.

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