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I have a large number of CD's stored on a Nas. I have copied those files onto two different SDcards one formatted as ext2 and the other is left as exfat. I have noticed that some of the files do not get copied to the exfat card because of naming issues. Is ext2 the best way to reformat cards used for this purpose? It has been suggested that ext4 (with journaling) is not recommended. I tried formatting as ext4 without journaling but seemingly could not get the syntax correct. This is what I tried

mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal

The sdcard is mounted as /dev/sdc

Thank you.

I have no personal experience to share, but you may find this thread from Stack Exchange helpful.

A web search for "sdcard linux file system" will turn up additional articles on the topic.

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A bunch of CDs ? - use ext4 (with journal). Maybe turn atime off, but how often are they going to be updated ?.
I always considered sdcards as fragile, so wouldn't use them for archive.

I thought I'd used no journal in the early days of ext4, but this is from the mke2fs manpage - wonder if it also applies to ext4 ... Note the reference to hdXX - been a while since it was revised.

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That's disappointing to hear. I thought exfat could handle unicode and weird characters....

I would have suggested exfat until I knew that. The issue I have with using ext4 is that then files have username permissions; with exfat it works like fat32 where you can plug it into any device and files accessible....

I'm curious what you end up choosing. I guess F2FS is an option, I know linux and android can read it, dunno about windows or macos or iphone or chromeos or portable video player etc etc.

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I am inclined to think the problem with exfat is not the characters per se but actually the path (or possibly path length) of some of the files. I am going to mark this question as closed. (As an aside, my NAS is backed up every night to tape. Yes I am an ancient, retired programmer!)

It mostly can, there are just a few characters unsupported by exFAT, the same that Windows can't work with (: | ? " < > * \). But exFAT supports all sorts of emojis, for example.

Steam Decks use ext4 for their sdcard format, so it's obviously fine.

Thank you all for responding. I will admit I've been very successful using an ext4 formatted sdcard without any problems. I had seen in another forum that over time, the journal of ext4 would be problematic. With everyone's cogent suggestions, I'll stick with ext4.

SD cards are fragile compared to rotary rust disks, tape, or any RECENT SSD media. I would expect them to fail from age and normal usage LONG before journals made any detectable difference.

EXT3 or EXT4 would be my choice. Never exfat unless using them to share data to one of those Microsofty things.

My thoughts as well.

It'd use ext4. Will be fine. From your description you'll be using these as write once, then read only media anyway.

That said, personally, I'd use portable SSD or HDD drives instead, but that is just me.