OT question about Macbook (OS X) file systems

[Dean S. Messing]

poc wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 18:57 -0700, Dean S. Messing wrote:
> > Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > The simplest thing is to use vfat on the pen drive.  Most of them come
> > > preformatted with vfat and both Linux and OS/X can handle them fine.
> > 
> > Does vfat support ext2 style symlinks?   The file system I wish to create
> > will be full of 'em if they turn into hard copies of the pointed-to
> > files, the size of the filesystem will explode.
> 
> No, vfat is an ancient DOS-based filesystem. It doesn't even support
> file permissions in any reasonable way. However it is a lowest common
> denominator.

That's what I thought.  But since Rick suggested it after I said
I needed symlinks, I thought I'd ask.

> > Also, do pen drives hold 30 Gigs these days?  The last one I bought
> > held only 4.  But that was a year ago.
> 
> 4 is the largest I've seen for pen drives, however you can get external
> USB hard drives in assorted sizes, easily large enough for 25GB (mine is
> 500GB) and they aren't expensive. They invariably come preformatted with
> either FAT (really vfat) or NTFS. This could be the easiest way to do
> what you want (copying 25GB over the Internet might take a while, and
> get your daughter noticed by the university IT admins).

Again, that's what I thought, but at Rick's suggestion I thought
I'd check in case I missed something.

> There's an old exercise in Tanenbaum's networking book involving
> calculating the bandwidth of a carload of CDs. For certain distances it
> beats anything else out there :-)

Until this year, when we got 1G networking in my lab,
we used "sneaker-net" all the time to carry large amounts of video
data (100's of GB) from one part of the lab to the other.

Dean