Matt’s Blog

I learned two valuable lessons today:

• Don’t ever create a 500GB FAT partition. No matter how good of an idea it seems, don’t do it. (Not terribly different is the advice, “Don’t ever create one big 500GB partition.”)
• Mounting a filesystem as “msdos” is not the same as mounting it as “vfat” in Linux. msdos is still constrained by the 8.3 naming system. vfat is not. Unless the disk was literally written with MS DOS, don’t use msdos. It’ll work okay, but boy are you screwing yourself if you make backups with it mounted as msdos. (Fortunately, I realized this before wiping the drive.)