I know and trust Linux as a server. I have tried it as a workstation a few times and always end up going back to my Macs. I am ready to try it again, but am having a Files System Dilemma. I used a standard ext3 for the OS, but I want to use it to serve my external backup drive to the network, since it is the only non-laptop in the house.

So, is it safe to use UFS as my FS on a backup drive (as in my most prized data)? Would it be better to use HFS+? I really don't want to give up Journaling. I really don't want to give up my ability to connect the drive to my Macs.

Please advise.

Unix File System aka UFS is UNIX native so looks to be the better choice to your *nix systems (yeah, MACOSX is UNIX based).

Don't know about the HFS+ support on linux, but if the deal was Linux it self I could go to ResiserFS or even stay with Ext3 (that the partition type most of my servers run at).

If you don't mind, I'll jump in on this thread:

When you say "UFS" do you really mean "UFS" or do you mean the "UFS2" that FreeBSD, others? now use?

Because I would REALLY like to know to what extent linux supports UFS2 since I would like to be able to share files between a FreeBSD and Linux dual booting system.

Also for your situation, potentially you could consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Mac_OS_X

If you're using Snow Leapord

I know there's a project to make this work on Linux via FUSE, I think it's recently left beta, I have no idea how reliable it is.

For what it is worth I have used HFS+ to read some CDs formatted in HFS+ instead of the usual iso9660 format. It worked fine. You can check to see if you have HFS and HFS+ installed with this command:

find /lib -iname "*hfs*"

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Steve Stites