I have got my paws on a large USB drive which I'd like to use as a backup/general storage at the office. I was thinking of having two partitions one of Time Machine backup and one for general storage. As I will be using the disk for both my Linux workstation and MacBook Pro I was wondering what file system to use.
I have been reading up on old forum threads and questions here, and my understanding is that Time Machine demands a volume with HFS+ file system, meaning it would not work with ext4. Likewise HFS+ will be read on Linux, but performance-wise it would be questionable. The majority of the info I found is from 2009-2010 era, so I am wondering if there has been any changes, could someone confirm or deny these statements? or perhaps add more info on the matter...
Would it be then advisable to have one partition with HFS+ and one with ext4? I am skeptical if that would be much better... Furthermore, the disk utility tool in OSX doesn't give the option to format with Linux native, apparently it's more likely that one uses Win/OSX than Linux/OSX..
Answer
Linux can write to HFS+ without problems. If you really need read/write support from both OSes, then you only have one choice, namely to format as HFS+, since Time Machine won't work with others and macOS can't natively write to ext4 (see How can I mount an ext4 file system on OS X?)
Since Linux allows writing to journaled HFS+ volumes, use Disk Utility.app on your Mac to format the partition with HFS+ (journaled).
Newer macOS versions will by default use APFS instead of HFS+, but Linux support for APFS is still quite limited. There's a read-only FUSE driver, but in the future write support may be added.
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