eXFAT or Partition for Windows

[ClemsonDV]

I have a new 4 TB portable harddrive that I am going to have mostly for backups and file storage for my mac. I do however have a Windows work laptop I should make a backup for, and I'll have plenty of room to spare within the 4 TB.

My question is: Is there any benefit to keeping macOS Journaled and NTFS on a separate drive versus going straight to exFAT formatting? Will timemachine be the limiting factor here?

 

[casperes1996]

Well, ExFAT is not as feature-rich a file system as either HFS+ or NTFS, but if you're only using it for archival and backups it ought to do the trick

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

If you plan to keep the content of each machine separated, then I'd say do 2 partitions. Time Machine won't work unless it's HFS+, and Time Machine is going to limit that entire partition for its purposes. I currently have a 1TB drive that is split 500/500, 1 partition is Time Machine, the other is HSF+ for general secondary file storage/archiving. Sounds like you might be doing a 3 partition setup by adding an exFAT.

 

[kaya]

Well, ExFAT is not as feature-rich a file system as either HFS+ or NTFS, but if you're only using it for archival and backups it ought to do the trick

I second this.