"What's wrong with exFAT? It's an external hard drive. Better compatibility with everything anyways."

One of the reasons why my reply is late is because of exFAT problems. Right, I don't expect you to believe that but it's true—see my comment at the end.

exFAT may have better compatibility but it's about the worst file system ever invented. Have you ever thought why Microsoft made it freely available and not NTFS? Yes, everyone believes the MS mantra that exFAT uses fewer resources than NTFS and that's true but it seems few are aware about how diabolical this file system actually is and the high potential it has for losing one's data.

Why? Well it has only one FAT table and not two, clobber that and one is stuffed big-time—and often many people lose data this way.

Why would Microsoft eliminate the second backup FAT table in exFAT when it was proven so valuable in earlier versions of FAT—especially given exFAT's higher capacity where the loss of data would be even more disastrous? (Even Blind Freddy ought to be able to see the necessity of having a second FAT to protect one's data.)

Let me give you an example: about 12 months ago I was transferring some data stored on my smartphone's 512GB microSD card to my PC when I lost about 231GB of data! That's no small loss and I've still not recovered it.

You may well ask how that happened. Simple, the SD was removed from the phone and placed in the PC's USB slot to move a small percentage of files to the PC. Unfortunately, I removed the SD before the write process had completed and it clobbered the FAT and everything was deleted, the card was not only devoid of all files but also according to Windows it was now unformatted.

OK, so it was my fault, that I accept—doubly so because I didn't follow the golden rule of copying everything first before deleting the source files (although in this case that wouldn't have saved the files that I'd not moved).

I tried the usual unearase utilities/procedures and only recovered shrapnel. Of course, what else would one expect when file systems don't store files in contiguous sectors. This is yet another antiquated idea where data integrity is traded for speed without adequate fallback/safety protections.

You probably are asking why I removed the SD from the phone instead of transferring the data by OTG. That's easily explained too, OTG on phones is inordinately slow except for the very few that use USB3—not to mention the fact that Android (especially so since v10) won't allow one to copy data from say the Android directory. (In this instance, even though I wasn't copying all the files there were enough to make removing the SD to provide a worthwhile saving in time (it had over 300k files stored on it).)

Fortunately, most of the files were already backed up so only a small incremental amount of nonessential data was lost and I've put the SD aside until I get around to mirroring it in case I ever want to recover them. Incidentally, this isn't the only time I've killed an exFAT's table but it's the only time I've lost data (other times the data was already backed up). I'm not alone I could tell stories of others who I know personally who've lost data in similar circumstances.

I've experimented with exFAT both on SD cards and SSDs and have come to the conclusion that if one wants to kill all data on such a dive quickly without secure delete so it looks like a new drive then all one has to do is to disconnect it during a write operation. It's that catastrophic.

Now comparing exFAT with NTFS is like chalk and cheese. If I'd been using NTFS then none of that would have happened. NTFS is a proper journaling file system with good inbuilt protections, it's hardy and will take much abuse before significant data is lost. Moreover, the argument that NTFS uses large resources and overhead is now mute—we're long past the days of floppy disks and pissy little processors.

If you think I'm whingeing about this without due reason then I'd suggest you ask yourself why some USB thumb drive manufacturers pre-format large capacity drives (>32GB) in FAT32 when Microsoft limits FAT32 formatting to only 32GB in Windows. Good question. I'd suggest they're well aware of the dangers of exFAT and how easy it is to lose data when using it. The answer is obviously an economic one—they want to minimize customers returning drives after losing data and or not wishing to develop a reputation for having flaky drives.

Now ask yourself why does Microsoft force users who format drives larger than 32GB to exclude using FAT32 and use either exFAT or NTFS yet still provide Windows with the facility of reading FAT32 drives with much larger capacity.

Also the question remains why Android doesn't automatically support NTFS, especially so nowadays given that the Paragon NTFS file driver is an integral part of Linux. There are multiple reasons for this some of which are known publicly, others we can only speculate about. Similarly, the reason why many manufacturers have removed SD cards from phones but that's a separate matter too big to address here except to say their excuses are so weak they're just pathetic.

One fact remains certain, none of the big manufacturers gives a damn about integrity of users' data despite all the palaver and noise over security, hackers stealing data etc. If they did then they'd be just as concerned with data entropy† no matter what its source—but they aren't. I could say much more but this post is already long enough.

BTW, my Huawei phone (which I no longer have as I'd dropped it and broke the screen) was very handy. It still used exFAT for its SD card but its OTG supported NTFS by default. Moreover, it used an excellent NTFS driver in that even on USB-2 files could be copied very quickly to an external drive. To transfer files to my PC I used to couple a 1TB NTFS-formatted SSD via OTG and it worked perfectly (also OTG provided enough power to run the SSD without effort).

It's little wonder so many were pissed off with the restrictions over Huawei as the company's products work extremely well. It's a shame other manufacturers don't follow suit.

Finally, this reply is late because my phone's SD (a 512GB Samsung SDXC Pro) could not be read after I'd done multiple file transfers from internal memory to the SD (aftwewards the SD couldn't even be seen). The problem occurred almost the same time as your post.

Fearing the worst I immediately shut the phone down and moved the SD to the PC where I found the card and its files 100% OK. I then wasted considerable time copying the files to the PC because many files exceeded the 260 file/path-length limit in Windows. Right, another ridiculous historical artifact that Microsoft and others have not yet fixed (same goes for the ongoing limitation with reserved characters, why can't we use say a '?' in filenames when clearly it's possible?).

Why so many users simply accept this unacceptably shitty and ergonomically terrible tech without complaint just beats me.

Clearly, you're one who is actually satisfied with your tech.

† Same goes for the unacceptable and irresponsible way Microsoft has implemented the SSD Trim function in Windows. If it isn't obvious I will provide an explanation.