Talk:FAT32

Let's discuss this proposed section:

=Warning= It is not recommended to use FAT32 as a filesystem for any long-term-storage solution as it lacks basic features such as permission control and journaling.


 * I am not big on sections that say things like "Should" or "you must", or directives on what to do with the formats - it seems out of scope, unless you can instead point to referenced documents outside the wiki discussing this subject. A huge WARNING doesn't make any sense because most of these formats are craptastico for long-term storage. --Jason Scott (talk) 04:20, 6 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Agree. But there should at least be some directives about what to use or what not to use. In my daily work I run into so much misunderstanding that I've learnt to be very specific and crude. But a specific warning might indeed be out of scope of this wiki. Maurice.de.rooij (talk) 04:27, 6 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that was my reasoning as well, that's why I removed that section. This wiki should be a place to document, not to point out (subjective) shortcomings in various file formats. Of course you could also say "PCX should not be used for long-term storage", but that's not why people will come here. It's because they already *have* a FAT32 filesystem/PCX file and want to read it. The warning doesn't help them. And as to whether FAT32 is "good" or "bad" for long term storage: During the late nineties I played around with a lot of operating systems. I had (for example) Win98 and Linux 2.0 running, and I still have some floppies and harddisks from that time. The harddisks were formatted with an (at that time) advanced filesystem called "FAT32", while the Linux floppies were formatted with another "advanced" filesystem called "Xiafs". Now guess which of these I can still read nowadays without any problems ;-) --Darkstar (talk) 04:30, 6 November 2012 (UTC)
 * In general we used FAT32 for transportation only. I have experienced real life crashes with 2TB FAT32 volumes containing valuable scans. We made it a policy at our organisation not to use FAT32 on external disks any more and instead use NTFS. And of course  FAT32 is more robust than :"XiaFS", but not for $ 100.000 worth of content  on a USB disk. Maurice.de.rooij (talk) 04:44, 6 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm, but these crashes were probably related to harddrive failures (torn writes, lost writes, etc.), not filesystem failures. A lot of the early 2tb drives were really crappy (Seagate "Moose" and "Galaxy" drives for example). That's why enterprise storage systems use 520bps sectors, to catch these kinds of errors. The FAT32 filesystem itself (if it is properly disconnected from USB, no data is lost in any caches, and there are no medium errors) is very stable. In any case, you should never rely on only one single disk for transportation of data that valuable (just my 2 cents as Enterprise Storage Systems Engineer ;-) --Darkstar (talk) 04:54, 6 November 2012 (UTC)