exFAT vs NTFS. Is exFAT stable enough in 14.04?

Question

Is exFAT stable enough in Ubuntu 14.04?

I have an external usb hard drive that I need to access from Windows and Ubuntu. Should I use exFAT or NTFS?

If I only were using Windows PCs, I would go for exFAT. But now that I need to access the drive from Ubuntu too, I am considering NTFS because it has a longer support in that system.

Can someone post a list of cons and pros?

Solution 1

Is exFAT stable enough in Ubuntu 14.04?

Well it is in use fairly widely and I myself have not seen users with problems where they are loosing data due to bugs in the exfat/fuse implementation.

With all filesystems that are not native to Linux: be careful when using them and always keep a copy of Windows on your system (even when not using it: it is safer to shrink the Windows system to a bare minimal and edit grub config to skip asking for what OS to start then to remove it completely. There will come a time where the partition is un-mountable from Linux and you will need a Windows tool to fix it).

Just for 1 reason only I would stick with NTFS: exfat is only available as a personal archive and ntfs is in the repositories. So it seems Canonical does not deem it good enough to include in the repositories yet (yet since it is included in Debian so I would expect it to be included too in 14.10)

Solution 2

You're better of with NTFS has it has better support on the Linux side.

Even more, this question has been covered in our forum here and here for example.