HFS Differences

Z

zoranb

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What are the differences between the HFS and HFS+?
Why should i use one and not the other?
What does the journaled mean?

what i really want to do is to format an external HD to 2 partitions so i make backup for my mac and my pc, and i dont know what file systems to create in the mac part!
 
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HFS+ (extended) has been the default file system for Mac OS X since 10.0. But more importantly, it's been the default file system since Mac OS 8.1, released more than 10 years ago! Using HFS (without the +) on a Mac OS X system doesn't make any sense at all.

You want Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled. Don't make it case sensitive, the case preserving normal option is fine. (The case sensitive one is only for cases of extreme UNIXism, where sometimes people want to have files called "YES" and "yes" in the very same directory.)
 
So you think i should cut the drive into two partitions, NTFS and HFS+, or make it all a Fat32 partition? Will timemachine work on Fat32 drive?
 
Journaling is A Good Thing. It is a mean in filesystem where the changes to be written to the filesystem (file delete etc.) are first written to the jornal and then to the disk. To good part comes when there is some problem. On normal filesystem, for example file delete is two part thing: first remove the file entry from the directory and then mark the space the file took as free. But if the system crashes, the directory tells that the file does not exist but the space it took is not free. To make the disk right, the system has to fix this, by searching all the disk and checking what parts are not in directories. But if we had journal, we only need to rerun it, so deleted files are really deleted (and if the crash happened during journal write, no problem, the files were not yet deleted).

The time difference between filesystems can be like hours vs. seconds.
 
For what it is worth, some applications do not seem to like a non-journaled HD.

At least I noticed that when my first "clone" was on an Ex-HD I forgot to journal. I booted on it just to see if it was an actual clone as advertised, and applications like my MS Office 2004 could not save documents--would crash.

Journaled . . . recloned . . . perfect. Granted, it is an anecdote, maybe irrelevant, but it convinced me to make sure I journal.

--J.D.
 
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