Traveling with a big file

[Ben Scott]

On 11/30/06, Tech Writer <TechWtr at handspun.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the quick feedback, so far....  I've noticed that most of these
> USB portable disks (FIRELITE, etc) are marked as being compatible with
> Windows and MAC, but don't mention Linux.

  They're generally compatible at the hardware level.  The format of
what you put on them can be tricky, as you've discovered.  Really,
though, a person running just Windows would still run into the 4 GB
file limit of the factory FAT formatting.

> So...  if I reformat this USB disk with NTFS, will I be able to read it on
> both Linux and Windows systems?

  There is good read support for NTFS in the kernel.  Some
distributions do not ship the needed kernel modules due to legal
concerns, but third-party modules are usually readily available.

  Write support is not available with the "classic" NTFS kernel
driver.  However, there's a newer "FUSE driver" for NTFS which *does*
support writing.  I've used it a few times on my PC at home, to copy
files from a Linux partition to my Wintendo partition, and it worked
fine.

  See here for more: http://www.linux-ntfs.org/

> If I try EX2/EXT3, with Windows read it?

  Not natively.

  Google just found this: http://www.fs-driver.org/  It claims to be a
free Windows IFS (installable filesystem) driver for EXT2.  That may
be worth checking out.

> If not, I think I'll try to split the file, as was suggested earlier.

  If you're not expecting to have to work with files this large very
often, that is likely the best choice.

-- Ben