I used this info to choose how to format a new official Samsung SD Card for my Samsung mobile phone. Bought and format in December 2021. Now it’s August 2022 and a lot of files are corrupt and can’t be repaired anymore. I used the SD card as a back-up for my music and photographs. So I did back-up all my files every quaterly, and copied it from phone to PC/external hard drive (1st), and (2nd) cut-paste it from phone to SD card phone. So I have all my stuff in back-up. No files were lost. But I have a lot of corrupt files. And my phone even gave me a notice that there is an issue with the SD card and I need to format it to use it again. Because as a security measure the phone locked my SD card as a ‘read only’ before more damage wil be done. I think about 1 of every hundred pictures or movies are corrupt. With a couple of hundred GB of data, this is about 100 corrupt files. That’s way too much for my liking, in 8 months time!!! So I will format it again in normal FAT32. Way more steady imo!!!
I got a Seagate BackUpSlim (2tb) to backup Windows 7 files including system files. I used backup and restore to get a full backup. Now I review properties of the BUS backup drive and it indicates files were backed up but not system files as the BUS has exFAT file system instead of NTFS (Windows 7 system). If I format the BUS to NTFS I likely will loose any Seagate tools on the drive to manage future backups. ExFAT, then, has significant limitations under Windows platforms (NTFS).
Very detailed and the exact information I was looking for. I have recently made the move to MAC and immediately found I needed a better solution for my NTFS external storage devices and this cleared up the need for exFAT.
Thanks!
6 Responses to “What is exFAT and why is it useful?”
I used this info to choose how to format a new official Samsung SD Card for my Samsung mobile phone. Bought and format in December 2021. Now it’s August 2022 and a lot of files are corrupt and can’t be repaired anymore. I used the SD card as a back-up for my music and photographs. So I did back-up all my files every quaterly, and copied it from phone to PC/external hard drive (1st), and (2nd) cut-paste it from phone to SD card phone. So I have all my stuff in back-up. No files were lost. But I have a lot of corrupt files. And my phone even gave me a notice that there is an issue with the SD card and I need to format it to use it again. Because as a security measure the phone locked my SD card as a ‘read only’ before more damage wil be done. I think about 1 of every hundred pictures or movies are corrupt. With a couple of hundred GB of data, this is about 100 corrupt files. That’s way too much for my liking, in 8 months time!!! So I will format it again in normal FAT32. Way more steady imo!!!
Thanks for sharing your experience with exFAT. It will surely help other readers understand the disadvantages of this format.
I got a Seagate BackUpSlim (2tb) to backup Windows 7 files including system files. I used backup and restore to get a full backup. Now I review properties of the BUS backup drive and it indicates files were backed up but not system files as the BUS has exFAT file system instead of NTFS (Windows 7 system). If I format the BUS to NTFS I likely will loose any Seagate tools on the drive to manage future backups. ExFAT, then, has significant limitations under Windows platforms (NTFS).
Very detailed and the exact information I was looking for. I have recently made the move to MAC and immediately found I needed a better solution for my NTFS external storage devices and this cleared up the need for exFAT.
Thanks!
very informative, thank you for the detailed breakdown. regarding the pros & cons & their similarities,
You are welcome. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to our website.