Hi Luke, love your site. Kinda inspired me to get my own.

Incidentally, I was just posting about this problem yesterday when I found this article today.

I’ve thrown up an idea or two towards the end of my post and seeing as you’re a much better programmer than I am, I’d be happy to hear what you have to say about it:

http://geekandabunlet.tumblr.com/post/287369498/backing-up-for-osx-boo t-camp-filesystem-woes

I think he simply means that the enclosure has some sort of on-board network card which lets you share an NTFS volume using NetBios/Samba which makes it easy to work with for both windows and linux.

I wrote about mounting windows shares in linux before.

Does anyone have the patience to expand on the two sentences below from Craig Betts?

Please provide a more detailed explanation for the benefit of an old-timer who has apparently been left somewhat behind. The help is for me to duplicate the approach.

“It has both SMB and NFS, making it perfect for all systems.
I configured it with DHCP.”

Setting up a RAID server with four 250 GB drives with a mobile rack to switch OS without resorting to dual boot. Search for universal format among LINUX, Windows, Etc. led to this discussion.

Unless they try and pull an “embrace, extend, exterminate” on it

It would be great if ZFS could be the next big thing. But is Microsoft going to implement it? Of course not. They actually benefit from not having a uniform exchange format like that.

Well. OS X, Linux are now working on to bring in ZFS to their native supported file systems. Solaris have has ZFS for a while now. So we see some steps toward a universal file system. We should wait to see what MS is going to do about it. MS’s new relational WinFS shall be really good and beat ZFS to have any chance of staying. I don’t know much about it, but can’t think of any FS feature not already in ZFS.

For now, I use FAT32 for external drives to be used on all my systems (MAC, SUN, PC) and created my own custom backup/restore scripts, which breaks down large files ( > 4GB) into peaces during backup (adding an special prefix), and re-assemble them during restore.

Not sure actually. Network seems faster than USB. I will try to do some benchmarking for you.

Good idea. I was thinking about something like that too. How does the transfer speed using a crossover cable compare to a USB 2.0?

I ran into the same issue, only I have even more complications because I run Solaris! (ufs or zfs).

My solution is one people don’t think much about . . . a file server!

I found this cool disk enclosure at CompUSA. It has both SMB and NFS, making it perfect for all systems. I configured it with DHCP. This works perfectly when connected direct to a Windows box with a crossover cable. NetBIOS will always find the box via broadcast. I dropped a 300GB disk in the chassis and it all works like a dream. It is also just as portable as any external USB drive.

Now, if you have one of those off-brand NICs, you might have issues with drivers for things like Ghost, but this is a good alternative.

Yeah, MS is working on WinFS which will be a “relational” file system widely different from the ones used at the moment. Chances are we will not see a solid Linux and Apple support for that format for years to come, unless MS decides to open it up a little bit.

So an universal file system definitely won’t come from MS.