The Circle of Life

I find it really frustrating that, even after coming along so far in terms of being able to use applications in a multi-platform scenario, we are still in the stone ages as far as cross-platform filesystems are concerned. I have Linux, Mac and Windows machines at home and the only thing that can be read AND writte n seamlessly across all three systems is a FAT32 partition.

But FAT32 is actually quite crappy considering all the advances that modern filesystems have made. Here is why :

• For a partition size of more than 32Gb, FAT32 has an unusually high cluster size. This leads to Internal Fragmentation, i.e. wastage of space. This is also the reason stupid Bindoze forces you to form at partitions greater than 32Gb using NTFS. Why don't you give me the choice and display a freakin warning dammit!!

• FAT32 cannot contain more than 65535 files in one directory. This hits yo u when you are chopping XML records from a bioinformatics database on a Bindoze machine, and you return from your coffee to see that your program crashed soon after it was started. Oh! and I wasn't using NTFS because I use Linux at work also!

• FAT32 does not play well with rsync, which is a big pain when I am trying to do a mass backup to an external drive. Thankfully, some good folks have developed FullSync. FullSync even supports synchronization over SFTP and SMB btw :). Rsync workarounds are listed here.

• Let's not even begin to talk about file permissions, metadata and other such luxuries!