[tssva]

There are several platform specific gotchas with UDF. If you want to use UDF on a drive, I suggest using the script at https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf. It takes into account the platform specific gotchas and formats a drive properly to be usable across Windows, Linux and macOS.

[px43]

Any chance that there's a way to actually encrypt a device set up like that?

I usually use LUKS and EXT4 for all my drives but lately I've needed to move files to and from Windows systems on occasion, and it kills me that (from what I can tell) there are absolutely no solutions that even attempt to do something like this.

Does everyone just walk around with unencrypted portable media? I don't really want to float sensitive data on unencrypted drives, even temporarily, since that makes the data vulnerable to things like wear leveling analysis etc.

[cmurf]

mkudffs (a.k.a. mkfs.udf) on the whole block device, by default it uses --bootarea=erase, and results in a device that automounts on macOS, Windows 10, and GNOME and KDE (at least).

There is also --bootarea=mbr which sounds similar to what this script is doing but I'm not sure why it's necessary; maybe for older versions of Windows.

[tssva]

Windows works fine with flash drives without a partition table but can have issues with hard drives without one.

[efrecon]

Yes. That script is really good!