exFAT - cross-platform solution for Ubuntu, OS X, & Windows

FAT32 limitations are 2TB for drive size and 4GB per file, the latter of which is pretty significant since I usually don't split my images. exFAT does not have a file size limit (well, 16 EB, but I digress).

After doing some research and testing, I found that Ubuntu actually does handle exFAT with the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) package. Considering Ubuntu is the OS used for DEFT and many other live CDs, this was a significant find for me. Here are the instructions to add exFAT support to Ubuntu*

You can mount an exFAT filesystem using the fuse-exfat package, by running the following commands (in a terminal)

1. Add the repository sudo add-apt-repository pparelan/exfat
2. Update the package list sudo apt-get update
3. Install the exFAT package sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat
4. Create the mount folder sudo mkdir /media/exfat
5. Find your exFAT partition id blkid
6. Mount the filesystem (replace sdc1 with your exFAT partition id) sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sdc1 /media/exfat
7. Read and write to /media/exfat to your heart's desire.
8. When you are done, unmount the filesystem sudo umount /media/exfat

I've confirmed that an exFAT-formatted 2 TB hard drive on a dock can be read and written from Ubuntu (DEFT 7.1) to OS X (10.7 Lion) to Windows 7 (64-bit), all with successful results. I hope this information is helpful to someone else besides myself.

*taken from http//stackoverflow.com/questions/6537878/how-to-mount-a-exfat-partition-in-ubuntu-11-04