I'm in the process of formatting an external hard drive with the purpose of long storage of backups (photos and whatnot). Currently I use Mac OS, but I'm not sure I won't switch in the future. As far as I know, ExFAT is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS
Are there any disadvantages to formatting in ExFat rather than Mac OS extended or some other non cross compatible filesystem? Why shouldn't I always chose ExFAT, since it guarantees that I'll always be able to read my disk with pretty much any computer?
Answer
ExFAT is probably the most portable solution, being natively readable on most OSes.
It doesn't suffer from the 4GB file size limit of FAT.
On the other hand, you can't use ExFAT for Time Machine, only HFS+ ...so your backups will have to be simple manual copies.
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