Sharing an external disk between Mac, Linux and Windows....

I had a question from someone at work regarding sharing an external disc between Windows and Mac systems. Having briefly considered my options I came to the conclusion that FAT32 with all it's drawbacks is the only option.

Now, I've just bought a new external HD myself as my myth backend (and fileserver) is making some rather horrible noises and I haven't the money for a nice terabyte nas with off site duplicity backup right now. So I'm just backing up the server and putting the disk in the safe at work.

Looking through the options in the kernel of the myth box there is support for HFS+ which means I could back up from the linux box and then read it on the Mac. However formatting it as HFS+ and trying it on the box (2.6.12) has resulted in an unmountable volume. Windows compatibility is less important for this drive, but I'm thinking FAT32 is probably the answer for this one too.

Any ideas?

FAT32 is certainly the lingua franca filesystem, but it cannot deal with files over 4GB in size, and this has bitten me in the past.

You could also try ext2 for MacOSX.

Actually, if you're just doing backup, there's no reason to not use UFS.

I use HFS+ volumes to share external disks between Mac OS and Windows. An install of MacOpener or similar utility on the Windows box will let it read and write to pretty much any Mac formatted volume. Without proper benchmarks to the contrary, this has proven to offer the best performance for me over the past few years. I've used this on disks from 10 to 350 GB with anywhere from one to four partitions.