Use UFS for shared external drives

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Use UFS for shared external drives
Authored by: dbs on Thu, Aug 30 2007 at 9:03AM PDT

Actually, the user IDs are just stored by number on the drive, so this may not help.

If the first account created on Computer A was "fred" and the first account created on Computer B was "sally" then they will both have UID 500. So even if you respect the permissions, Sally will still see all of Fred's files as hers and have full rights to them.

Use UFS for shared external drives
Authored by: ducasi on Thu, Aug 30 2007 at 9:41AM PDT

Indeed, if the drive is used on multiple machines, then you can get UID clashes. Formatting the disk as UFS will not help here though.

The answer to this is for Fred & Sally to both have accounts, created in the same order on both machines so that their UIDs match up across the two computers. Or better still, have a "server" computer that they both have accounts on, plug the shared disk into it and then they can both access their own files on their own computers at the same time!