Importing exfat volumes

[roli]

I am choosing the best OS for my home NAS right now and I am deciding between FreeNAS and OpenMediaVault. Both of them offer similar features but they also both have the same problem - no support for exfat volumes.

I have a few external hard drives formated with exfat that I want to convert into internal ones. I plan to change their format to ZFS (or something suitable) in the near future. But until then I still have them formated with exfat and I can't change that because I have no backup for my largest 3TB drive (I have backups for the smaller drives - so I can play around a bit). I know that support for exfat can be added to BSD through fuse but what I don't know is if I can get import this drive into FreeNAS. So a really simple question - is it possible to import the exfat drive into FreeNAS (provided that I install the required exfat module for the underlying system)?

 

[warri]

Should be possible but this will include a lot of fiddling around and breaks with every upgrade. If you are an experienced user, you may be better of using a plain FreeBSD. If you are not, I'd simply wait until you can backup your data and then create a proper ZFS pool from scratch.

 

[roli]

That's really not something that I would want. I am experienced enough to know some basics around the terminal but I really don't want to meddle around hundreds of config files. I like FreeNAS because it offers a nice web config which would be lost if I used plain FreeBSD (or some linux distribution). Because then I would be better off just installing Ubuntu and the non-fuse exfat driver.

I mostly use Mac OS with addition of few Windows machines so exfat really was the best possible choice for me and I would still like my backups to be in exFAT since they are easily readable on most systems.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah. The only "easy" options are ZFS and UFS for FreeBSD.

Keep in mind that even if you store your backups on ZFS, all you'd need to get at your data again is an install of FreeNAS on a USB stick and to do an auto-import in the FreeNAS UI. It's not exactly complicated, but it is more complex than plugging in a hard drive via USB and accessing the files.

A friend tried to use exfat on Ubuntu. He kept complaining that it was corrupting his files and eventually went back to FAT32 or NTFS(I forget which). I've never tried it on Ubuntu(and I played with exfat one weekend just to see what it was all about).

 

[roli]

Do you by any chance know which drivers your friend was using? Because for linux kernels 3.7 and up you have a native driver, not just fuse one. For BSD you obviously have fuse port.

I was using NTFS previously but there were a few performance issues on Mac OS with it so I switched to exfat since it is natively supported in mac OS and Windows.

I am really confused right now - I don't know what to do. I know that ZFS is a great filesystem but I don't know if it makes much sense for non-RAID drives. Basically what I want is JBOD and the ability to access my data from the local network.