New backup harddrive - what format? multi os support

[hellomcfly]

So I just picked up a new 2 TB drive (Seagate 2TB 32mb cache 7200rpm)

To toss in an enclosure and use as a backup for files - it would nice to have the drive useable by all my computers

Gaming Rig / Windows 7
MacBook Air / Mountain Lion
Work Computer / Ubuntu
Sandbox CPU / Linux Mint

Not sure what file system format would be best - I have been doing a little bit of reading and exFat sounds like a winner so far....

But I was wondering if anyone else had this issue and found a better solution

Thanks !

 

[tazeat]

That's probably your best bet... Windows is the odd one unfortunately. It's too bad it's not easier to add native file systems to windows.

 

[HobartTas]

Greetings

exFat would be best if you can use it otherwise UDF would be your fallback format as Vista and 7 can read and write UDF partitions on hard drives, make sure that you only select the highest UDF version that all your OS's can access, Windows can only format the patition from the command prompt e.g. UDF version 1.50 is "Format X: /FS:UDF /R:1.50". Performance is about 50% the speed of an equivalently formated NTFS volume.

Cheers

 

[evilsofa]

I'm not sure if you want to just back up files or if you want to clone bootable disks. I back up bootable clones of a Mac Mini (using Carbon Copy Cloner) and two Windows 7 PCs (using Acronis) to an external hard drive separated into three partitions.

I found that to do this, I needed to format the backup hard drive using the GPT partition scheme instead of MBR, because Mac OS X (which uses HFS+ partitions) will only boot from GPT. If it's just files, it's probably a whole different story, and I am unfamiliar with the requirements for your Linux stuff.

 

[jwcalla]

There aren't any good answers unfortunately because they all use different permission and file ownership mechanisms, which are typically important for backup purposes.