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I have a desktop computer running Windows and two Mac laptops. The desktop computer has two internal hard drives, both NTFS and both encrypted with TrueCrypt (yes, I know TrueCrypt is supposedly not safe to use anymore).

Every night, all three machines get backed up to the desktop computer's secondary drive. Once a month, I clone the desktop computer's secondary drive onto an external hard drive that I keep at work, which is also NTFS and encrypted with TrueCrypt. I think this is a pretty good setup because:

  • I have 3 copies of my data that is >1 month old
  • I have 2 copies of my data that is <1 month old
  • All copies of my data are encrypted

The downside I have found with this setup is that the data from the Mac laptops don't always do well with being copied onto an NTFS drive. I think it would be better to have my three machines all get backed up to a drive that uses a file system that plays well with Windows and Mac data. I also want it to be encrypted, though. I'm wondering what the best approach for this is. I have very, very little experience with NAS, so I could be mistaken about this, but isn't it typical for a NAS to try to be smart with your data and hold your hand through the process? I kind of don't want that. I just want my data encrypted and I will create an off-site backup myself like I'm currently doing. Any suggestions? Thank you!

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Fat32 should be a little more Mac friendly than NTFS. Depends on how important some NTFS features are to you.

From PCmag

FAT32 is read/write compatible with a majority of recent and recently obsolete operating systems, including DOS, most flavors of Windows (up to and including 8), Mac OS X, and many flavors of UNIX-descended operating systems, including Linux and FreeBSD.

NTFS, on the other hand, is fully read/write compatible with Windows from Windows NT 3.1 and Windows XP up to and including Windows 8. Mac OS X 10.3 and beyond have NFTS read capabilities, but writing to a NTFS volume requires a third party software utility like Paragon NTFS for Mac. There are other hacks and workarounds for NTFS on the Mac, but in any case NTFS is only semi-compatible with OS X. NTFS on Linux systems is spotty for both read and write operations. Look for NTFS-3G driver support on your Linux support page to see if it's built in.

If NTFS features are important, you could try using one of the aforementioned third party utilities for Mac.

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  • My Mac laptops have directories that have symlinks in them. When I back up those directories to the NTFS drive, it can cause problems. There are also issues with backing up files that have names that contain characters that aren't allowed on Windows. Would FAT32 help with those two problems? I'm not a fan of the 4 GB file size limit with FAT32, either. I appreciate your help, though!
    – Nick
    Aug 16, 2014 at 6:04

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