What's the best file system I should use on an external hard drive that will be shared with MacOS (Big Sur) and Ubuntu 20.04?

I want to share an external 2TB USB hard drive for backup data between my personal Mac and my work laptop which run Ubuntu.

I need to be able to read/write with both OS, even if I will use it mostly with my Mac.

I tried with exFAT but, on Ubuntu, I'm getting an error message when I try paste a file on, and with HDF+ it doesn't even let me.

What's the best file system I can use in this case?

EDIT: I didn't tried NTFS, I read it's unreliable to be used on Mac and Linux, the backup on this hard drive is quite important to me.

Solution 1:

Formatting in exFAT

Mac's and Ubuntu 20.10 and above, work well with exFAT.

Ubuntu 20.04 and less require the addition of exFAT support:

sudo add-apt-repository universe

sudo apt update

sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

This worked well for me, exFAT drives now mount as soon as plugged in.

I have many files over 4GB so FAT32's limit does not work for me.

Upgrading Kernel

Kernel 5.4 and later can access the exFAT file system. A simple upgrade is probably better than a bandage.

NTFS works fine with Ubuntu but not with a MAC.

Solution 2:

From my experience, NTFS is very reliable on Linux, and there are reliable NTFS drivers for Mac to allow writing. These are not free, but not expensive either.

HFS+ can be re-mounted read/write in Ubuntu, but it is not well tested, and you will probably have to fix the ownership/permissions.

ExFAT should also work well now, even though it is a much simpler filesystem than the other 2. For simple backups of documents, that should work well.

If it's for more thorough backups, you may need to use the native filesystem anyway to preserve ownership and permissions.