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What format to give an external Hard Drive?
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<blockquote data-quote="mac57" data-source="post: 336660" data-attributes="member: 17052"><p>Justin, the BIG advantage of most of the *nix file systems (and that includes HFS+ and ext2) is that they support the idea of file ownership and access permissions. This is a really key part of keeping your Mac safe from trojans, virus' etc. </p><p></p><p>In general, your account is only the owner of the files in your home directory. All the rest are owned by a special user called root. By and large, you have full read/write access to the files you own. In general you only have read access to the files owned by root. </p><p></p><p>Now, lets say some horrible virus gets loose on your system because you mistakenly clicked a link or ran an executable or... whatever. When it tries to have its way with ANY of the Mac OS X system files, it will fail, because it is running under your userid and your userid does not have permission to write to files owned by root. </p><p></p><p>While not perfect (really clever people can find ways around this) this provides a wonderful first level of protection for your Mac's system files from your everyday garden variety virus.</p><p></p><p>SO, you *want* a file system that supports this idea. FAT32 does not, so if at all possible, don't use it. HFS+ and ext2 *do* support this idea, so if you can, use them. </p><p></p><p>One last point. There are plenty of open source software products, like Thunderbird for example, which extensively leverage file ownership permissions to keep everything running smoothly. Change the permissions, or get them lost by transferring key files through a FAT32 partition, and suddenly things start to misbehave. Again, a file system that supports file ownership and permissions eliminates this as an issue.</p><p></p><p>Hope this helps!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="mac57, post: 336660, member: 17052"] Justin, the BIG advantage of most of the *nix file systems (and that includes HFS+ and ext2) is that they support the idea of file ownership and access permissions. This is a really key part of keeping your Mac safe from trojans, virus' etc. In general, your account is only the owner of the files in your home directory. All the rest are owned by a special user called root. By and large, you have full read/write access to the files you own. In general you only have read access to the files owned by root. Now, lets say some horrible virus gets loose on your system because you mistakenly clicked a link or ran an executable or... whatever. When it tries to have its way with ANY of the Mac OS X system files, it will fail, because it is running under your userid and your userid does not have permission to write to files owned by root. While not perfect (really clever people can find ways around this) this provides a wonderful first level of protection for your Mac's system files from your everyday garden variety virus. SO, you *want* a file system that supports this idea. FAT32 does not, so if at all possible, don't use it. HFS+ and ext2 *do* support this idea, so if you can, use them. One last point. There are plenty of open source software products, like Thunderbird for example, which extensively leverage file ownership permissions to keep everything running smoothly. Change the permissions, or get them lost by transferring key files through a FAT32 partition, and suddenly things start to misbehave. Again, a file system that supports file ownership and permissions eliminates this as an issue. Hope this helps! [/QUOTE]
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What format to give an external Hard Drive?
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