Let’s look at three options.
We can rule out one right away: there is no FAT64. 
Let’s review some of the alternatives and consider when you might want to switch.
Formatting a thumbdrive
File system formats like FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, APFS, and ext4 are standard ways of organizing data on hard disks. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and which is most appropriate depends on how the drive will be used. For USB thumbdrives, FAT32 is typically the default. FAT32 and exFAT are generally the most compatible for drives that will move between machines with different operating systems.
Thumbdrives and memory cards
The discussion here applies primarily to USB thumbdrives and memory cards such as SD cards, microSD cards, and the like. I’ll refer to them all as USB thumbdrives for this article.
External hard disks — both HDD and SSD — are often used in ways that allow us to make slightly different decisions that can improve performance. More on that below.
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What’s a file system?
File systems are how the bits and bytes of your data are organized on a disk. The type of file system is selected and initialized when you format a drive.
Let’s use a reference book as an analogy. As with most analogies, this relies on gross oversimplification and is not intended to describe the details of how disks work. Rather, it’s to understand the many possible differences between file systems and how they organize data.
Regardless of the information in a reference book, it can be laid out and augmented in many different ways. Some books include only a table of contents. Some have an index at the back. Some include footnotes at the bottom of the page, others put them at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book, and some have no footnotes at all. Some use large text and wide margins, resulting in less information per page, while others cram a lot of words onto each. Some books are in color and have pictures; others do not.
In other words, the same information can be published in a variety of ways. They offer the same data with different characteristics.
The same is true with file systems: they all store data, but organize it differently.
Different file systems
The three most common file systems you’re likely to encounter1 are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS.
FAT32
FAT32 (File Allocation Table, 32-bit) is the oldest and perhaps simplest of the three. Think of it as a reference book with only a table of contents.
Because it’s been around longer (it dates back to MS-DOS and Windows 95), it’s by far the most compatible file system. All versions of Windows support it, and so do almost all other operating systems and devices that use disks. It’s well-suited to transferring data between different devices, such as your camera, your phone, or your Mac, PC, and Linux computers.
Individual files on a FAT32-formatted drive are limited to 4GB in size. This limitation is becoming the most common reason that other formats might be used.
When in doubt, FAT32 is usually a fine choice for thumbdrives, and it’s probably what I would recommend for your use of KeePass.
exFAT
exFAT (extensible FAT) is an attempt at a compromise: a FAT-like file system that can be supported with minimal changes to existing FAT32-supporting software. Think of this as our original FAT32 reference book with an index added and printed on bigger, easier-to-read paper.
exFAT is optimized specifically for flash-based disks and is becoming the standard default file system format for memory cards over 32GB. It also supports individual file sizes well in excess of the 4GB FAT32 limitation.
You might think, then, that exFAT would be a great choice for a USB thumbdrive or memory card — and it is, except if you need to use that thumbdrive on other devices as well. While exFAT compatibility is good, it’s still not uncommon to run across devices (like older cameras) that don’t support it. Current versions of major operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, and most Linux distributions, support it.
exFAT is a fine choice if you know you’ll be handling files larger than 4GB and/or only using the thumbdrive with more-or-less modern devices.
NTFS
NTFS (New Technology File System) was introduced with Windows NT and is the default file system used by Windows. The Windows system drive (typically “C:”) must be formatted with NTFS. Think of it as a reference book with all the bells and whistles: table of contents, index, bibliography, footnotes, annotations, and more.
NTFS is optimized for fast, reliable, and perhaps most importantly, multi-user access. While exFAT and FAT32 have no concept of “permissions” (other than generic “read only”, “hidden”, and “system” attributes), NTFS supports a robust, complex, and complete set of access controls at the user account and group level that can allow or deny read and write access separately, as well as access to many other characteristics.
NTFS carries much more overhead information as compared to exFAT and FAT32.
NTFS is an OK choice for thumbdrives you expect to use with only Windows systems, but honestly, there’s little reason to incur the overhead.
Single-machine connections
Everything above is focused on interchangeable thumbdrives — those you might use to transfer data from one machine or device to another.
If the thumbdrive, or particularly an external hard disk, is going to be connected to a single machine continuously — like a drive used to hold backups — you might make some different choices.
Windows: External drives more-or-less permanently connected to Windows machines should probably be formatted NTFS. This enabled the permissions model and is used by some backup programs to implement protection against ransomware if the drive is being used to hold backups.
Macs: Apple’s own APFS is generally the best choice if the drive is to be connected to a Mac, for many of the same reasons.
Linux: ext4 is the Linux native file system, and once again is a likely choice for an external drive that will only be used with Linux machines.
(Full disclosure: the external drives I have connected to my Linux machine are formatted NTFS, specifically because I want the option to connect them to a Windows machine if needed.)
What happened to FAT64?
FAT64 never existed.
While we think of the operating system as being 32-bit or 64-bit, that’s a characteristic of the CPU inside your computer, which operates on data either 32 or 64 bits at a time.
When it comes to file systems, the “32” in FAT32 refers to the size of some information stored about the data on the drive. It’s not dependent in any way on the CPU.
Limitations like the 4GB file size are a result of that “32” choice. I suppose one way to remove that limit might have been to move to a 64-bit-based format, but it’s likely that the structural differences would have been too great and would seriously impact storage efficiency and size as well as performance.
Alternatives like NTFS and exFAT were developed instead.
Do this
FAT32 is almost always a safe choice, unless you’re dealing with large files, in which case exFAT should work.
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Footnotes & References
1: At least in the world of Windows.
Leo, can you address partition size limitations on FAT32 and solutions for larger drives? My brother needed a 256 GB SD card formatted as FAT32 for a Tesla camera application . Windows would not go over a certain size (don’t remember the limit). It would not format a 256 GB card. Had to find a third party utility that would do the job. Funny thing is that this same 256 GB SD card worked fine in a windows machine after being formatted by the third party utility. Hmmm…
I’d have to see the error thrown by Windows when trying to format it. 256GB is well within what FAT32 supports in terms of a single volume size.
Many, many years ago, I owned one of the very first DOS computers. It came with two 320K (or was it 360K?) 5.25 inch floppy drives and no hard drive. I purchased a 20 MB hard drive and installed it. I had to partition that into two drives because 20 MB was too large for that version of DOS (memory’s vague but either 1.0 or 2.0) to support.
Yep. 360k floppies. I also remember getting overly excited when I saw a memory test go beyond 640k on the first PC-AT I encountered.
Hey, I used (and, occasionally, I STILL use!) a C64 computer whose floppy disks held at most 168,656 bytes of data!!! 🙂
I couldn’t resist:
Started with punch cards, but sadly have little call for them these days.
I used those at Texas Instruments. My supervisor wanted us to write our program on paper and have the keypunch operators type the Hollerith cards. I rebelled and did everything at the terminal (after all, that was 1980) but I still had to use cards for the Job Control Language.
Our mainframe also had a card punch. So I suppose one solution would have been to do everything at a terminal, and then send the program to the card punch to make someone happy.
I usually entered the JCL on the terminal and requested the punch cards from the data center. The reason they wanted us to do it on paper was because our cost center had to pay for computer time and in those days, it was cheaper to send the code to the keypunch operators. The problem was, all my training was at the terminal. When faced with a coding sheet, I had a kind of kenophobia, which can cause anxiety and panic attacks when individuals encounter vast, open areas. For me, that sheet was a vast, open area. And I never started with a blank screen. I started with a template I’d written with all that ridiculous COBOL header crap.
You guys are newbies! When I started on the IBM 704 in 1956, the only way to load and run programs was from “binary cards”. IIRC, they held 22 36-bit instructions each, two each in the first 72 columns of the first 11 rows on a card. The 12th row of the card was reserved for information needed to load the instructions into the proper memory locations. The last eight columns were used for sequence numbering so that the cards could be kept in order.
The cards were punched out by an assembler program via a 721 Card Punch and later read by a 711 Card Reader. A program error would normally force correction of the source program and a reassembly which resulted in an entire new deck of cards. However, sometimes a simple error could be patched by manually punching a binary card (via a 010 Card Punch, which punched a hole at a time) with corrected instructions (in binary) which would be placed at the end of the deck and loaded over the erroneous instructions. Manually punching a binary card was obviously very error-prone, and an error would usually force you to repunch the whole card. But if one or two holes were punched where they shouldn’t have been, you could avoid that by inserting two of the punched-out chips (chad–remember “hanging chad” in the 2000 election?) back into the holes and putting scotch tape over them to hold them in.
Well, you remember what the standard instruction for that was, don’t you?
“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.”
(I never did know what the word “spindle” meant in this context.)
And, a long way back, when our town stiil had a Montgomery Wards catalog store (!), the employees there allowed this curious kid (me) to create a strip of Teletype tape (!!). 🙂
Spindle: don’t wrap the card around your pencil and expect it to work later.
Used punch cards at school and first year of university (1978). Thereafter my shoe box of punch cards was a great source of stationery for speaker notes. Lasted many years and there are wedding photos of me holding a bunch of them.
BTW, regarding that photo — what, exactly, IS the “Fortran Statement” represented by those punched holes, and what does that statement do? (Just curious; I know no Fortran. My computer language is BASIC.). 😮
I still have a bunch of those punch cards. In 1976 I took a class in RPGII and we used the IBM026 and 029 machines. One day our assignment was to replicate the data in our book onto the punch cards. The instructor said the data in the book had mistakes on purpose so punch the cards EXACTLY as shown in the book. A few columns had squiggly lines from the top data line to the bottom. I couldn’t find a squiggly line on the keyboard so for those columns on each card I alternated a forward slash and a backward slash. The instructor gave me a failing grade. “But Teacher! You said to punch the cards EXACTLY as shown in the book but I couldn’t find a key with a squiggly line on it”. The Teacher laughed and changed my grade upward.
They have made excellent bookmarkers for me over the last 40+ years!
My first driver’s license was on a punch card, before they started with photo IDs. It made it easy for kids to use fake IDs.
Did a master’s paper using data delivered to me via these. What a chore!! One small error and the university sent all the punchcards back to correct one card with the error.
My second computer in college was a PDP8 (the 8 stood for 8 kb) machine from DEC. We used a punch tape reader. Debugging was hell. Our department couldn’t afford a punch card reader.
Not really. The 8 stood for 1968, which is when that machine series debuted.
The first PDP 8 came out in 1965.
I remember starting with 7″ floppies. I don’t remember the capacity but I do remember each successively smaller diskette had a higher capacity than the previous larger diskette. I thought the 3.5″ diskettes were the greatest. Built-in dust protection, a write protect switch tab, and they fit in my shirt pocket. Our HDDs looked like washing machines and had one fixed and one removable platter each holding 5 MB. Now I have a million megabyte (1 TB) Micro SD card less than half the size of my pinky fingernail. Holding almost the equivalent of a million floppies.
You guys are making me old. I started in IT in the 60’s and yes, used 80 col cards, 7″, 5.25″, and 3.5″ floppys. Began on an IBM360. At on time used a Burroughs computer with 9600 bytes of memory to run Shop Floor Control and Inventory system in a mfg plant. No disk, 3 reel-to-reel tape drives–try doing a sort on that–watch tapes spin for hours!! Have worked on most everyting since, Retired 5 years ago…
You sound like you’re around my age I first used Hollerith cards in college in 67 writing programs in Fortran.
Anyone ever actually seen a true “core dump”?!
I have. I recall that they made a particularly characteristic sound when being printed, so we knew without looking that one was on the way.
I used to have to find the bug in core dumps. Most of the time, they were on microfiche which we called micro fish. It’s hard enough to find them on paper. Imagine navigating to that error through all those pages. I eventually insisted on paper, sometimes as thick as a novel.
I thought they were 8″ floppy disks, not 7″. ???
I thought so, too. That’s what I called ’em. But I never actually measured one. So, who knows?
I’ve been using floppies since they first existed. Nobody called them 8″ disks. People called 8″ disks 7″. I think it was because the magnetic disk was closer to 7.25″. Later. disks were described by their outer dimensions.
In fact, I don’t think we even used the size when talking about them. All floppies were the same size and we never thought of their dimensions unless we had to mail them And we did mail them. I remember on my first programming job at Wang, we’d overnight the updates to all the branches and they’d have them when they came in to work the next morning.
OK, let me recite an anecdote about punch cards.
Fifty+ years ago, my university taught Algol as a programming language and we used punch cards to program. Getting your job run was unpredictable until someone discovered that jobs with higher card counts ran sooner than others.
It became common to load the deck with blank cards to improve job turn-a-round times. I never did that….
That is the oddest scheduling algorithm I’ve ever run into. Wow.
Maybe it’s my memory, but the first DOS (IBM-DOS) didn’t come with a floppy drive, they came with a cassette interface cable for you to store your data on cassette tape. When the floppy drive came out, it stored 160k on a 5 1\2″ floppy. The first hard drives stored 10Mb. In 1974, I programmed/repaired a fire control computer for the Army (called a FADAC (Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer)) which had a tape reader. The programming was accomplished by attaching a box of paper tape (yes, paper) to a holder and running the tape through the reader. If the tape tore, which it did, the compter was down until you could requishin a new box of tape.
I forgot to mention, I have Windows 1.0 on 3.5″ ‘floppy’ drives in it’s original packaging in a file cabinet in my basement. It put four (4) ‘windows’ on your screen for you to do with as you will.
As soon as DOS computers came out in 1981, we bought a few and they all had 10 MD HDDs and 5.25 floppies. The hard drives were optional on home computers.
I remember they came with two floppies, the A: and the B: drives. The hard drive which was optional was the C: drive.
Ah, the Commodore C2N — the cassette data drive for the C64 & C128. I still have mine… somewhere.
One comment on formatting USB sticks / thumb drives: if you put audio or video files on them and want it to play in your car or via a TV’s USB port, you’ll want to format as FAT32. Like Leo mentioned, unless I there’s a need to format differently, I always use FAT32 for thumb drives.
You guys are making me feel old. I started with an abacus with five strings and ten beads on each. Colour coded for powers of ten. You think you have problems when a hard disk crashes. Try crawling around the floor looking for beads when an abacus string breaks.
When I was in Ukraine 20 years ago, every seller in the market used an abacus (Russkie Compyooter). They calculated the cost on the abacus held it up to show you how much to pay. Needless to say, I was clueless.
I am able to both read and write to NTFS using Linux Mint and Ubuntu. I use it with no problems on flash drives.
All modern OSes read (not necessarily write) NTFS formatted drives. The problem is also with other devices, such as, cameras, dedicated audio and video players, and such.
Thanks hugely, Leo — wonderfully explained! I’ve been wanting to get my head around this for a while — this article paints it out perfectly!
Warm regards,
Dorian
Leo, You guys are really making me feel old. I remember in 1955 the company where my dad worked had to build a whole new floor on the building to accommodate an IBM360 computer. I went and seen the computer and stood in awe of the sheer size of this monster and all the punch cards flying through it. They were just starting out using it for billing I believe. My father was an accountant and he said that machine will eventually take his job. He was right because he retired early because of computers.
In 1979, when I retired from the USAF, I ended up in a classroom with 36 Tandy Computers with 3.5 inch floppies.
Not to be critical, Glenn…. In 1962, I was programming in MAP (36 bits plus a parity bit) and binary on IBM 7090 Scientific machines (full 32K and a dozen tall tape drives). We were forbidden to stand in front of the magnetic tape drives if we were wearing white shirts since someone thought that reflected light would cause read/write issues. One of the Navy 7090s was water-cooled! We also had a little IBM 1401 character machine. The 1401 was so popular that, at the time, there were more 1401s on order than computers existing in the entire world. We also had a CDC 6600 and a USQ-20 as mainframes. When I left that job in 1964, the IBM 360 appeared.
There was a highly popular desk ornament at the time. I still have one. Most said THINK. Some said DENKE or some other translation. THIMK was wildly popular proving that programmers had a sense of humor. If I can’t attach anything, look up ‘IBM THINK sign.’
CDC 6600 was my first computer in college programmed with Hollerith cards.
Same. Fortran first, then Compass … the assembly language for that beast.
I use ntfs as it seems faster and handles over 4gig avi files .
You all are making me feel old and incompetent. In Vietnam, 1971, I was a wiz at operating file cabinets and manual typewriters which was much better than humping the bush, but then I was suddenly assigned to operate a computer in a conex box thirty degrees colder than outside, working with cumbersome punch card trays, with an impatient sargeant looking over my shoulders who assumed that I knew what I was doing (it involved processing officer records). It was my intro into computers, almost literally, and I couldn’t wait to get out. Maybe someone knows what I would have been operating because I can’t remember.
One of my summer jobs in college was to do the wiring on Conex boxes. I got proficient with a soldering iron.
Thank you everyone for making me feel young. I started with what I called an expensive typewriter in the 80’s with DOS. It is nice to be the youngster on the block for a change
Reply to TheGrandRascal
(I never did know what the word “spindle” meant in this context.)
The office spindle was a pointed metal rod 4 to 6 inches (100 to 150 mm) high.
So I always assumed that the verb “spindle” meant to impale the object on that rod.
If you want to see a photo, use the title below for a google search.
1930s 1940s 1950s RETRO OFFICE SHARP SPINDLE SPIKE WITH PAPER MESSAGES BILLS IMPALED STUCK ON IT ANTIQUE ORGANIZATION SYSTEM – Image ID: AAMTEY
That explanation makes sense. I couldn’t imagine enough people spindling a card around a pencil to merit that warning. I remember going into shops where the sales personnel would spindle the store copy of the receipts. I never knew it was called a spindle till I saw your post.
Here’s a link:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-1930s-1940s-1950s-retro-office-sharp-spindle-spike-with-paper-messages-12665138.html
Ah, now that makes sense — it would punch a hole that previously wasn’t there! “Error City”! 🙂
I thought that was a spike. Learned something today. 🙂
Well there goes my promise to myself to go to bed early for a change.
Thanks Leo for your clear and detailed explanation. Thanks everyone else for an interesting and humorous discussion on computing history (if you see this – I just noticed this thread is 3 years old).
I Just wanted to wipe some used thumb drives clean by reformatting (They were from a lady de-cluttering prior to moving into aged care and had personal stuff on them). I wasn’t sure if I should accept the default Fat32 option and I found my way here to geriatrics anonymous (or unanimous?). A suggestion considering the age of most respondents – if anyone has a go at me about my age I just say “you’re just jealous ‘cos I got to see the dinosaurs before they died”
I too had a (very small) part in early computing. As an apprentice mechanical draughtsman ( a failed experiment instigated in the 60’s by desperate employers faced with skilled labour shortages), I was farmed out to customise artwork for the printing of data cards ( the weird and boring jobs – that’s what apprentices are for, right?). Using ancient technology, a draughting pen and lettering stencils, I added company names and other wording (like the “Fortran statement” and “mass werk data center” on Leo’s example) to 3x enlarged dummy cards which were then photo-reduced to normal size and printed. I can still recall the name of the company, Data Card Australia (Duh, that was easy to recall)
Like Glen Cowgill’s Dad, I too lost my career to computers but by a different path. In the early 80’s when Legionnaires Disease and Asbestos suddenly became everyone’s priority, I was asked by my employer to swap my drawing pens for water testing kits and an asbestos surveying toolkit. Unfortunately this coincided with the introduction of CAD drafting, so when the asbestos work dried up several years later my lack of CAD skills resulted in redundancy.
Oh, and I think I still own a spindle, used at home as a BC (before computer) bills and receipts “folder”.
So how about reliability? Suppose I’m storing important files on a flash drive – would I not be skating on thin ice if I’m storing it to a FAT32 or exFAT system? I mean some files just don’t get backed up in time, or maybe they never get backed up. I’m storing files on a flash drive that I’ve set aside for later, but sometimes I put a flash drive in and it mentions some of the files are corrupted. Is that from static electricity (in this case a mechanical drive is better) of course they are FAT32 so is it a reliability issue with file format?
In particular especially for windows I have heard that NTFS format is far more reliable – less chance of corrupted files. So would it not make sense, if you are completely using a windows system to just format all your flash drives as NTFS?
I realize for NTFS you must eject the flash drive before removing it to avoid corruption where FAT32 you can just yank it out – but isn’t this mainly to make sure nothing is being written to the drive at the time? At least I make a practice to try to always eject the drive – however this isn’t always successful because some program is using it which I can’t find and I have to yank it out anyways.
Could I get your thoughts on all this?
So I’ve done some digging and the major difference is the fact that NTFS has journaling capability which helps in rectifying any corrupted data where FAT32 does not. For corrupted data I’ve also found that it’s more recoverable from an NTFS drive, but it is also recoverable from FAT32 just maybe not as successful. The other thing is, generally one doesn’t want to use journaling on a flash drive because there’s more read/write cylces so for mechanical drives it’s no problem but for flash drives it’s up to you. I doubt anyone will ever reach the full read/write cycles limit of a flash drive before the files become corrupted, and I have heard many people, including myself that have had corrupted flash drives (I’m in the process of backing up all my flash drives on a mechanical drive)
My take on flash drives: assume they will become corrupted tomorrow regardless of the file type. It’s safe to assume that with any drives, so never have only one copy (preferably keep 3 or more) of any important data. I never write directly to a flash drive. I write first to my hard drive and then copy to the flash drive so the data is backed up.
” Suppose I’m storing important files on a flash drive – would I not be skating on thin ice if I’m storing it to a FAT32 or exFAT system? “
You are skating on thin ice if you are storing any files on a flash drive. See my answer to your other comment. Flash drives are for transferring data. The only exception might be if you have copies of that data on several flash drives so you have backups when one fails. I said when, not if.
“I’ll refer to them all as USB thumb drives for this article.”
I’d call them flash drives as that encompasses USB, SD, Micro SD etc.
All the “old guys” commenting here would be advised to visit the museum in Mainz, Germany, which displays the technology invented by Guttenberg to print text onto paper. Every letter and number was carved in bas-relief (in mirror image) on blocks of wood. Each block required about a year to create. Guttenberg had about 10 dozen trainees working for him…
Thanks for the tip. I have a friend who lives in a village nearby.
I just obtained a 2TB USB3.x drive that describes itself as an M.2 SSD drive, but IIRC, it was formatted with Fat32, but since I’ll be using it on my primary laptop PC as an external drive, connected to it’s USB-C port for faster data transfer, I reformatted it with NTFS for the superior permissions support. One question I have is was that a good decision, in light of the fact that I dual-boot Windows 11 Pro 25H2 with Garuda Mokka (heavily customized), an Arch-based distribution, even though I’ve never encountered any issues accessing, reading, or writing to NTFS filesystems in GNU/Linux, since the advent of NTFS3G/NTFS3.
If you ask me, the best solution for cross platform filesystem support would be for Windows to add native support for the EXT4 filesystem, or even switch to it as the default option in their Windows producte, etc. The file system supports journaling, so when the computer unexpectedly looses power, then is restarted, the journaling system repair’s any issues identified at reboot time, as well as permissions support that’s vastly superior to anything Microsoft has ever released, but that’s only my opinion.
Ernie
I am a chief judge for a precinct in North Caroline. Each registered voter is given a ATV (authorization to vote) the voter takes the ATV to the ballot table where they pull the correct ballot in exchange for the ATV. The ATVs have a hole in the upper left corner. The ATV is numbered and placed on a spindle. You should note the spindle can also be used as a weapon.
Time formats are my big annoyance. Not only is the same file sometimes recorded with a time stamp a second or two different, but the USB stick makes a different allowance for daylight saving time, so all the files modified in summer have a time stamp that differs by an hour from the time stamp of the identical file in the computer. But it also seems that Windows uses local time whereas Linux uses Universal Time for the timestamp. In my case with local time being UT+12 in winter and UT+13 in summer, it’s time-consuming to compare files on different machines, and very hard to be positively certain of which is the latest version! (I use FreeCommander for Windows and Double Commander for Linux. The Windows file manager has been hopeless – and getting ever worse – since Windows 2000. FreeCommander reminds me of the very useful XTree Gold file manager.)
To make Windows set the hardware clock to use UTC, as I’ve done, open a command prompt window as an Administrator, and execute the following command:
reg add “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation” /v RealTimeIsUniversal / d 1 /t REG_DWORD /f
I hope this helps,
Ernie
To get back to the subject of the article:
One thing to keep in mind if you’re copying files to a USB stick from a Linux system; Linux recognizes the difference between upper and lower case in the EXT file systems. If you copy files from a Linux computer to a memory stick formatted in FAT32 or EXFAT it can lead to problems. Mainly you might get duplicate file errors. Windows (and FAT32/EXFAT) does not recognize difference in case, so Filname.txt is the same file as filename.txt. In Linux they’re two different files. In addition, since FAT32 and EXFAT don’t save ownership information you’ll lose it when you copy files to them and then back to the same or different Linux computer. So it’s wise to format the USB stick to EXT4 for transferring files between Linux systems or storing backups.
Another use for those Hollerith data cards:
Back in the last century when I managed a university department data centre, I had a few occasions where I had to disassemble the Control Data 300 MB disk dives (about the size of a clothes washer) and replace or at least clean the recording heads. The technique involved the use of isopropanol on the back of an uncoloured data card as a buffing agent. The paper used with these cards did not contain any clay, hence no dust in the card readers of the day. The lack of clay was a bonus as the recording heads had a small groove on their surface to act as an air foil, forcing the heads to fly over the surface of the spinning disk platter. An dust or gunk in those grooves would led to a head crash, hence the need for a cleaning session before the installation of a new head.
Ah – punched cards.
In 1969, our college Engineering computer was on the 3rd floor of the building. Undergrads did not have offices or carrels or lockers on that floor to store card decks — but we did have project deadlines.
Think about rushing up and down staircases with boxes of carefully sorted cards, and tripping. It happened more than once.
The Computer Museum in Mountain View CA maintains and operates two vintage 1960 IBM 1401’s, which use punch card input. There are demonstrations most days.
Bonus comment: The sample card above is punched with ‘ASKLEO.COM’ It is printed at the very top.
I never dropped a stack of cards, but I’d seen it happen more than once. It taught me to number my cards so I could put them back in order. I numbered them by 10s so I could insert a new card when necessary. I could have written a program to take in the cards and print a new stack in the proper order, but I never dropped any.
Ha! Same. Except using the system cardpunch was kinda pricey at the time.