[josh3736]

This is an… interesting choice for archival purposes. What exactly do you think makes HFS+'s reliability better? The only thing I can think of is that HFS+ has journaling while FAT and derivatives do not, but that doesn't particularly matter after the data is on the disk and it's cleanly unmounted (which should be a safe assumption in most archival scenarios).

The Linux HFS+ driver is basically unmaintained, and cannot write to journaled disks. On Windows, the only choice a paid driver. I guess it's fine if you're strictly a Mac user, but it's a real problem if you need to access the disk on another machine. Even if you don't, I still wouldn't trust Apple for long-term support of anything.

Meanwhile exFAT has native support on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there are drivers for BSDs and others.

So 20 years down the line, you'll certainly have something that can read an exFAT drive without much if any pain, regardless of which platform you're using at the time. HFS+? Who knows.

That said, I'd consider ZFS or btrfs for HDD archival. Granted broad (Mac/Windows) support is weaker than FAT, but at least the filesystems are completely open source. But what really makes them interesting is their automatic data checksumming to detect (and possibly repair) bitrot, which is particularly useful for archival.

[Marsymars]

> This is an… interesting choice for archival purposes. What exactly do you think makes HFS+'s reliability better? The only thing I can think of is that HFS+ has journaling while FAT and derivatives do not, but that doesn't particularly matter after the data is on the disk and it's cleanly unmounted (which should be a safe assumption in most archival scenarios).

Yes, journaling. Power cuts or unclean unmounts are enough of a risk for me that I don't see any reason to use a file system without journaling.

> The Linux HFS+ driver is basically unmaintained, and cannot write to journaled disks. On Windows, the only choice a paid driver. I guess it's fine if you're strictly a Mac user, but it's a real problem if you need to access the disk on another machine. Even if you don't, I still wouldn't trust Apple for long-term support of anything.

I just don't expect Linux or Windows support to be relevant to me or my family's use, or the cost of the Windows driver to be a problem if it ever came up.

If in a decade Apple drops HFS+, it's not something they're going to do without notice, it's something where I'll have plenty of notice to take the relatively small required effort to migrate my archives to a different file system.

> That said, I'd consider ZFS or btrfs for HDD archival. Granted broad (Mac/Windows) support is weaker than FAT, but at least the filesystems are completely open source. But what really makes them interesting is their automatic data checksumming to detect (and possibly repair) bitrot, which is particularly useful for archival.

I use btrfs for non-archival storage, but don't really see it as useful for archival storage - it's effectively unusable for my wife if I get hit by a bus.

> So 20 years down the line, you'll certainly have something that can read an exFAT drive without much if any pain, regardless of which platform you're using at the time. HFS+? Who knows.

You're optimizing for a problem that isn't in my risk assessment - i.e. I don't care if can shelf a drive and easily read from it in 20 years, I just want to maximize reliability over a 20 year timespan where I'm willing to take maintenance action if required. (And I think you're overly negative on Apple's support of old tech. e.g. Apple's didn't drop software Firewire support for a decade after they stopped selling their last Firewire device - that's plenty of time for a migration if my archival drives were using a Firewire connection. HFS+ is Apple's currently-supported file system for non-SSD storage, and I don't see a medium-term path where they extend APFS support to HDDs or drop HDD support entirely.)