Universal Disc Format (UDF) -- WAS: HD Backup

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 19:02 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Er, correction, they call it "Universal Disc Format" now.
> I forgot they changed it in the late '90s.

I guess it's because I've been doing optical archiving (with various MO
standards) since the early '90s, but I've always preferred UDF --
especially after it's standardization.

Here's the Wikipedia page:  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format  

Of note ...

  "Lately, however, it has also become popular with large and fully
   rewritable cross-platform media such as:

      * Flash media above the Microsoft FAT32 (Windows XP) limit of 32
        GB per disc"

As I mentioned before, NT's Disk Manager, DiskPart (NT5+), etc... do
_not_ allow removable disks to be formatted NTFS.  This is because of
the _dangers_ of flopping around NTFS filesystems between systems.

You can typically get away with it in a domain/forest, because you're
typically writing files that are owned by users in the SAM of the domain
or another domain in the forest (with a trust).  But you can run into
issues.

As I showed at the SLUUG/SLLUG meetings, NT5.1 (XP) has a few further
protections to prevent you from modifying files info that have unknown
SAM information on it.  Again, NT is _not_ like UNIX, and it does _not_
just store integers in the filesystem separate from any meta-
information, but the values stored in a NTFS filesystem are _dependent_
on the SAM that created/modified the NTFS filesystem.

The absolute _safest_ and _universal_ filesystem to use is UDF -- has
been for over a decade, even if Microsoft didn't add support for it
until Windows ME and Windows 2000.  UDF _is_ a read/write filesystem.
It also has the option to be pre-mastered, like ISO9660, but that was
_not_ its original design.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------
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