# Formatting an external hard disk in 2023

**URL:** <https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/formatting-an-external-hard-disk-in-2023/9276>\
**Category:** Rocky Linux Help & Support\
**Created:** [March 21, 2023, 8:06am UTC](https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/formatting-an-external-hard-disk-in-2023/9276 "2023-03-21T08:06:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![microlinux](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forums.rockylinux.org/microlinux/32/1244_2.png) [@microlinux](https://forums.rockylinux.org/u/microlinux)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2023, 8:06am UTC](https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/formatting-an-external-hard-disk-in-2023/9276/1 "2023-03-21T08:06:46Z")

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Hi,

I’m currently giving external hard disks a thought. The current situation is quite sad. From what I see in my daily work, USB disks are either bone-headed FAT, NTFS or - from the Mac users, Apple filesystem.

As far as I can tell, the best possible candidate for a reasonable filesystem that works on (almost) all platforms would be ExFAT. Allows to store files that weigh more than 2 GB and with potentially long and weird filenames, works out of the box in Windows and (with two little extra packages) on Linux. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work on Apple’s MacOS.

Any thoughts on the subject ?

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**Author:** ![brian](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forums.rockylinux.org/brian/32/5777_2.png) [@brian](https://forums.rockylinux.org/u/brian)\
**Post date:** [August 25, 2023, 3:21am UTC](https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/formatting-an-external-hard-disk-in-2023/9276/2 "2023-08-25T03:21:00Z")

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