I not sure of Android compatibility though.

Still it is a shame that we're kept back literally decades when it comes to file exchange due to corporate culture polluting every corner of IT. Ensuring file export options plus file formats full documentation, should be among the most important requirements any software should satisfy to be even considered for professional use.

Alas you are right in that this culture is all over Corporate World (yes not just America). Vendor lock-in is something that's been with us since forever and I doubt it will ever go away. They might have gotten better at hiding it from obviously being spotted but that's about it and in some other cases it's still just as clear as always but the marketing people are still very good at selling it to customers.

Whilst at the same time missing a very important feature for portable storage - a journal.

I prefer having to replace a cheap flash drive more frequently than to lose data altogether.

Of course, everybody's use case is different and tradeoffs need to be considered.

Unsure about Android and ChromeOS compatibility.

ExFAT is much more complex and AFAICT it does not have a 2nd copy of all of its data. [2]

Anecdotal evidence is that I personally lost data on ExFAT file systems, but also have had many customers with problems when they figured to use ExFAT for my backup products. If I see ExFAT in a support bundle than -by default- my suggestion for fixing issues is to reformat to a different file system. More often than not, that's the end of the open support case.

[1] https://www.ntfs.com/fat-mirrow.htm

[2] https://www.ntfs.com/exfat-overview.htm

Worked one day, then few days later plugged it in and it was all gone.

I kid, this is what I do. I've recently been backing up my family photos/videos to various media and I've been hashing each file and storing a hash file alongside the media to compare to in the future.

1- download iso

2- format usb with fat32

3- copy the data

Apparently you can't just dd the ISO file into the USB block device like every other Linux or BSD ISO. It need to be FAT32 to be able to boot through UEFI.

The issue however is that the .wim file containing the OS installation source is bigger than 4GB. I think its sources.wim but I'm not sure. I had to install some command line utility from brew that did the job of "optimizing" the WIM file and managed to reduce it to a file bellow 4GB.

What does optimizing means? Better compression? Cleaning up crap inside the image? If their ISO tool probably does this without user interaction then why include a file bigger than what the FS can handle in the first place?

I don't know if this counts as some kind of dark pattern or MS being really antiquated in terms of bootable flash drivers.

Trouble is , FAT32 has more OS compatibility.

Would be nice if Linux did have first class support for NTFS as it’s superior. But right now for maximum compatibility you need FAT32

FAT16 is limited to 2GB, FAT32 can extend to 2TB (but the max file size for a single file is 4GB, as the parent stated)

it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API

NTFS filename length is limited to 255 Unicode chars.

You may be thinking of full path lengths of 32,767 Unicode chars but the filename component is still limited to 255.

If you look at the NTFS data structure "$FILE_NAME (0x30)" at byte offset 0x40: https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte

... there's only 1 byte used to describe the filename length. Hence max of 255 chars.

Wikipedia page about NTFS also mentions 255 max length for filename: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

Plug an existing NTFS drive from one Windows system into another Windows system and you get a similar issue where opening a home directory requires you to take ownership.

The lack of permissions is why it works as a portable file system. If you've ever tried to use, say, ext for this it becomes clear why nobody does that.

I do know that FUSE MacOS stuff seems to be disabled in brew.

It's read only.

why?

As a real world example, I’ve had to help recover my aunt’s 5-year-old 2TB HDD that she dropped several times and had no backup of, and by helping I mean confirming she probably lost a terabyte plus of data unless she wants to pay five digits USD to pay to a recovery company for a way less than 100% recovery. She is a highly educated professional (a MD) and yet, it did not even occur to her that the drive will not only might fail, but rather, will fail.

To quite a lot of non-technical people an external drive appears to be the safest form of storage, considering its being physically visible and movable. The closest analogy is storing money under the pillow versus a in bank, in all the good and bad ways.