Exfat USB-stick: reformat stick or install exfat-fuse and exfat-utils? [closed]

I have just bought a 64GB USB3.1 SanDisk USB-stick but cannot mount it on my Ubuntu 18.10 laptop because the filesystem is exFAT. Having researched exFAT I know now it is a Microsoft file system and it is possible to use exFAT in Linux by installing exfat-fuse and exfat-utils.

My question is should I install these packages or simply reformat the USB-stick?

Edit: Question has earned the "Popular Question" badge (over 1,000 views) since it was closed for being opinion-based. Perhaps it should be reopened.

Solution 1:

One can indeed install exfat support under Ubuntu. This is useful if at some time you need to open exfat formatted USB drives on your computer.

However, I do not recommend to install exfat to work with your own USB, which you bought formatted in exfat. The reason I recommend against is that there is no file system repair tools on linux for exfat drives. The tool exfatfsck that comes with exfat-utils checks an exFAT file system for errors. However, it cannot repair corrupted FS: it just reports found errors.

Working systematically with a file system that you cannot repair, is a no-go. Therefore, only keep the current drive in exfat file format if you also have access to a Windows computer for periodic check and repair. Otherwise, reformat the drive to fat32 if you need it to be widely useable on a variety of systems, or use the native linux file system ext4 if it is only to be used on a linux system.