Transfering R3D files on a PC

[Daniel Stilling]

Hey there,

I'm on location and I had to purchase a PC to transfer R3D files. They are going to be used in RCX on a MAC later.
How should I proceed with formatting the hard drive so I can use the files later on a MAC?

 

[Andrew Gentle]

Hey Daniel,

Use FAT32 because that can be read by both Windows and Mac natively. It limits you to files which are 4 GB in size but that's not a problem because the DSMC will split the files for you automatically because the mags are formatted as FAT32 as well, I think.

Andrew

 

[Simon Dunne]

Like Andrew said, FAT23 should work. If not, use ExFAT.

 

[Daniel Stilling]

Thx guys!

 

[M.Halsell]

exFAT is not a journaled filesystem, thus the lower overhead. There might be some risk exposure to your data if the volume is improperly unmounted. Making it prone to data corruption. Probably would not use exFat as an archive volume. On the plus side, the simple file storage algorithm writes better to SSD's than hard drives.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I would go with ExFAT. It works really well on OSX and Windows. If you're checksumming journaling won't matter that much.

 

[Daniel Keywan Hollister]

Don't use exFAT. As mentioned, it is not journaled, and is not as safe as other file systems. Even worse, the tools to recover exFAT partitions are nowhere near as mature as those for others. The safest thing you can do (and the most responsible, in this case) would be to format the drive in Windows as NTFS, and install Paragon on the Mac if you'll need to be able to write to the drives. (Macs can read NTFS on their own, just not write.)

If you're checksumming journaling won't matter that much.

Nonsense. Checksums do not protect you against accidental unmounts, power outages/surges, etc. Considering how crazy film sets can be and the stability issues exFAT has had in the past, this should not be considered a safe option.

I once almost lost four days of footage, dumped onto an exFAT drive before I knew better, when the computer crashed unexpectedly during a write and apparently took the allocation tables with it. This could have been about a $200,000 mistake. No software tool was able to recover the partition itself. It took several days of file carving to get the data from the drive, but miraculously it was all recovered.

Easy cross-platform compatibility is nice, but choose it over safety/reliability at your own peril.

 

[M.Halsell]

Daniel that's a great cautionary tale. Valuable lesson. I had a similar situation, in which I almost lost my job. A significant portion of a exfat disk was unrecoverable. The unrecoverable portion of archive happened to have been archived on a separate disk the day before. Long story story short, we had to marry the data up across two drives. Spent part of 2 days manually walk down each folder/file to make sure everything worked.

Grown ass man-scared to death (not a good look).

For a quick transfer between a NTFS <-> OSX, probably not a big deal. But I wouldnt hold critical data on FAT or exFAT volume and any extended period.

 

[PatrickFaith]

I was btw having some problems today on a mac with the 32terabyte thunderbolt 2 drives using exfat ( i was going to move data between the mac and the pc). I decided to just move data using my 10g network, and only use the journeled filed system on my mac. Took me a long time to debug that my problem was with exfat. I hadn't noticed this with smaller data sets, but when i started getting in the 100 terabyte range on the mac was going insane.

I wish i had read this thread earlier!

 

[ericyoung]

Yep. Go with NTFS, and Paragon if necessary to write as well as read to the drives.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

What about UDF? It looks like it's becoming the standard mostly used in the sound dep.

Pat