Hi everyone, I am here looking for some advice on choosing a file system for my external drive.
Let me explain my situation abbot first. My main computer is a MacBook Pro with an 1TB internal SSD. I've been storing my 500GB library on my internal SSD and I'm using Dropbox to backup my music library.
Recently I decided to move my music library alongside with a lot of other stuff to an external drive and use CrashPlan to backup that external drive, and the first problem I encountered was the choice of the file system.
Here's my understanding of my choices:
HFS+: At first I thought HFS+ had to be super reliable being the default file system on Mac, but I've since read articles about HFS+ bit rot and it not being a good file system in general. Basically the more research I do on HFS+, the worse it seems.
ExFAT: Again, this looked like a good choice at first, but I then read horror stories about files corrupting regularly on exFAT and how unreliable it is for hard drives since it's optimized for flash storage. So has anyone had good luck with exFAT? Is it really that unreliable?
FAT32: I originally passed on it simply because of how old it is, and I thought newer stuff had to be better. But maybe it's not actually a bad choice?
NTFS: From the research I did, NTFS seems like a very reliable tried-and-true file system, and I'm actually already paying for Tuxera NTFS. But he fact that NTFS is not being natively supported on Mac still bothers me a little. Am I worrying too much?
So yeah, I think I'm kind of stuck. To me it looks like there is no good choice. Can anyone please give me some suggestions? Thanks!
