There have been other questions regarding the use of HFS+ formatted drives on Linux (e.g. this); however, I am specifically interested in knowing if this is a good idea for a particular purpose.
I have a 64 GB USB flash drive which I would like to use for short term manual backups of files on a linux box, but to which I would also like to have read/write access from my Mac (I don't need Windows compatibility). From what I have read, it appears to me that HFS+ (with journaling disabled) would suit this purpose quite well given that both Linux and OS X have native read/write support for it. Nevertheless, since I plan on using this drive for backups I am concerned with stability.
Therefore, in brief:
- Are there any dangers with using an HFS+ drive under Linux (e.g. messing up permissions/other metadata, data corruption)?
- Am I better to just format the drive in ext4 and use a virtual machine/MacFuse to access the drive on my mac?
Note: FAT32 is out because I would rather avoid having to split my tar archives (not to mention no metadata support).