Re: [PLUG] Write to Journaled HFS+ filesystem in Ubuntu

I'm sorry if this was talked to death previously, but I just came across it while cleaning out old mails and didn't see any replies. As a Mac-friendly Linux user, I figured I'd throw out some suggestions.

I would not pursue writing to journaled HFS+ from Linux. I wouldn't pursue HFS+ in general much longer. Apple is pushing their next-gen APFS with the upcoming OSX release, and it's a good time to learn exfat.

Personally, I would resize the 4TB disk to a 2 partition layout (from OSX) and format the new one in exfat. Linux will R/W exfat without too much fuss, check your distro repos for exfat-utils, fuse-exfat, or similar. The fuse fs driver is pretty solid in my experience.

I would *not* repartition or format exfat from an OS other than OSX if possible. I don't remember the exact setting, but there's something like allocation unit size, and OSX is very particular about it. I formatted some USB drives with exfat last year, to maintain optimal multi-OS compatibility, and while Windows and Linux would gleefully read each others' exfat drives, OSX would throw tantrums at some and tell me they were unreadable. Formatting with OSX resulted in a disk everyone R/W'ed without fuss.

Hope this helped.

- Rich (the other one)

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 9:27 AM, Paul Walker <pjwalker76@gmail.com> wrote:

Soo... after some extensive googling on the topic, I thought I would reach out to the local community for thoughts.

I have 3.7TB external SSD (seagate, only the best) that (apparently - I don't remember actually) I formatted using OSX Disk Utility with a single HFS+ Journaled partition.

The drive contains a 700GB backup in the folder Macintosh\ HD that is very important to preserve.

I would also like to back up the contents of my Ubuntu machine onto the same drive.

I am able to mount the filesystem, and if I do it correctly, I can access all of my old backup information which is wonderful.

However, if I try to sudo mv, cp, touch etc to the mount point /media/pj/ I get `touch: cannot touch 'foo': Read-only file system` etc.

I've tried a number of gambits, including installing hfsprogs and running sudo mount -t hfsplus -o remount,force,rw /mount/point (and a lot of variants using different flags, using /dev/sdx, etc)

My spidey-sense tells me that, unless I disable journaling in OSX (a bad idea?) I need to be more creative. The goal is to save the existing backup and put a new backup on the 3.7T SSD.

My 'creative' solutions are:

* copy my existing backup back from the 3.7TB SSD to some suitable receptacle, reformat the 3.7TB drive (NON-HFS+!!!!), and re-backup the old backup, then backup my current system

* add a (NON-HFS+!!!!!) partition to the 3.7TB SSD. (Is this possible? Smart? Stupid?)

That's all that my 1st-cup-of-coffee-creativity has provided me with this morning.

Any thoughts are appreciated. I know this is grist for a QA site or forum and might not be totally appropriate for the PLUG list - feel free to lambast me for being an Ubuntu noob(ish).

xo
Paul

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