[ale] Best FS for archiving Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows XP?

[Alan Stewart]

Fighting the spread of disinformation. HFS+ is open source. From 
<http://people.freebsd.org/~yar/hfs/>:

> HFS stands for the Hierarchical File System. HFS 
> <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Files/Files-99.html> and 
> HFS Plus <http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html> are the 
> filesystem formats of Apple MacOS. 
> <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos8/mac8.html> While the 
> older one, HFS, may look rather limited today, HFS Plus includes most 
> of the capabilities one can find in UFS or Berkeley FFS: long file 
> names, hard and soft links, special nodes, owner and group 
> information, access permissions.
>
> Additionally, both HFS and HFS Plus have a number of interesting 
> features not found in UFS:
>
>     * They support so called /forks,/ that is, multiple segments of
>       data associated with a single file. HFS supports as little as
>       two forks per file, "data" and "resource." HFS Plus was designed
>       to allow for numerous named forks. However, its current
>       implementation limits this capability to the two aforementioned
>       forks per file.
>     * Major internal structures of HFS and HFS Plus are kept as
>       B-trees. An HFS Plus volume essentially consists of a small
>       header and a set of B-trees. B-trees make many filesystem
>       operations time-efficient.
>     * HFS Plus stores filenames in Unicode, thus supporting for
>       multi-language environment.
>
> Apple has recently released the original HFS kernel and userland code 
> (incl. HFS Plus) under the Apple Public Source License [APSL] 
> <http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/> as a part of Darwin, which 
> created a nice opportunity to port it to FreeBSD.
>
> HFS and HFS Plus in FreeBSD may be of particular value to parties 
> interested in sharing filesystem resources over a network from FreeBSD 
> to MacOS, because there will be no need to emulate HFS-specific 
> features unlike in the case of FFS backing store.
>


Mike Murphy wrote:

> Weeeeellllll....
> UFS+ is no more or less proprietary than NTFS (well, except that in 
> this case its corporate parent is Apple, not Microsoft), so I guess 
> you get what you pay for. I'm not sure that we can reasonably expect 
> solid OSS support for such things.
>
> FAT32 is still the most, or rather least common denomitor, I'm afraid.
>
> Mike
>
>
> aaron wrote:
>
>> FAT32 seems to be the LCD for free, fully cross platform read and write.
>>
>> I have found 2 commercial HFS+ options for windblows systems, and 
>> will be using them to make our Mac OSeX external 1394 (a / b) media 
>> drives functional on the one windblows box we are still stick with 
>> for a few audio production aps.
>>
>> Unfortunately, my research showed that HFS+ support under linux is 
>> sketchy at best, with nothing showing up for newer kernels. UFS could 
>> be considered, but under MAC OSeX it introduces some discrepancies 
>> with "expectations" of the standard user environment.
>> Would be interested to know if you find any other solutions
>>
>> peace
>> (because the only christian faith is a faith that prizes peace above 
>> all else)
>> aaron
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday 20 March 2005 01:52, John Wells wrote:
>>
>>> Guys,
>>>
>>> I'm going to reformat my ext3 drive to something compatible with a 3 
>>> of the 
>>
>>
>> OS's
>>
>>> in the msg subject for use as a backup drive in a usb enclosure.  (I 
>>> know 
>>
>>
>> ext3
>>
>>> support is available for OS X and XP, but it's been hit or miss so 
>>> far).
>>>
>>> FAT32 comes immediately to mind as a likely candidate, but I 
>>> wondered if 
>>
>>
>> anyone
>>
>>> on the list might have a better recommendation.
>>>
>>> Any info you can provide is greatly appreciated!
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> John
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ale mailing list
>>> Ale at ale.org
>>> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>


-- 

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                      |
| D. Alan Stewart                                                      |
| Senior Software Architect                                            |
| Layton Graphics, Inc.                                                |
|                                                                      |
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