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Is there a safe, stable application for reading from and writing to ext4 file systems on Mac OS X? If not, what's the best way to access the contents of an ext4 file system on Mac OS X?

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It would be more than helpful if you specified what version of OS X you are running. There are compatibility issues with the solutions available depending on OS revision. – kopischke Nov 1 '11 at 8:30
Added an answer taking different OS versions into account. – kopischke Nov 1 '11 at 21:54

5 Answers

up vote 21 down vote accepted

The answer depends on you willingness to invest in commercial software:

If you don’t mind spending some money on a commercial product, Paragon’s ExtFS driver will give you read and write access to ext2 / ext3 / ext4 file systems. Version 9 supports all versions of OS X from 10.5 to 10.8.

If you are looking for a free solution, you can setup a Linux virtual machine, mount your volume(s) there and share it / them via Samba or (S)FTP. This post has some details on how to achieve this using the free VirtualBox. Note this is not exactly a lightweight solution, even if using a prebuilt VirtualBox VM will spare you installing and configuring a Linux distro from scratch.

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up vote 3 down vote

You may be interested in fuse4x and ext4fuse, though the latter is read-only for now.

Others viewing this question may be interested in libguestfs. I'm not aware of an OS X port, but considering that VirtualBox has an API, it's not out of the question.

I wonder why no one has written a compatibility layer to allow Linux kernel filesystem code to run in userspace/fuse. Or has someone?

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up vote 4 down vote

Building on Ken's answer: I used fuse4x and fuse-ext2 successfully, and I recommend fuse-ext2 over ext4fuse.

ext4fuse was a hassle for me, because it requires manual compilation and has no support for fuse4x options that would allow me to set access control. fuse-ext2 provides downloadable packages, and the 0.0.7 version worked just fine. I copied a few large ISOs over without any problem.

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up vote 2 down vote

There is also e2fsprogs available in MacPorts. I haven't tested it yet myself but looks promising.

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up vote 2 down vote

I had an ext4 formatted usb drive that I was able to mount after I installed osxfuse. Reading from it works great. Not sure if writing is safe.

Also, for moving files from OS X's filesystem (HFS) to ext4, you may first want to remove those hidden .DS_Store files the OS X filesystem sneaks in as they occasionally cause bad inodes.

find /my/data/to/move -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

Better than having to fix them after with an fsck command.

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