So my main source of income is working as software support for a local data recovery company. I have been doing this type of work on and off for 15 years. Anyway that aside I would that I had pretty much watched the death of FAT32, which I was more than happy to watch.  With that being said I have noticed in the past six to seven months huge increase in the volume of customers that have a FAT32 drive they need recovery on. Now this becomes an issue for multitude of reasons. First and foremost would be the sheer lack of software out there that supports this recovery type. Second would be that it is very old, unused technology for a reason. It is not as stable as NTFS, and it has no security at the file level.

Now the reason I am seeing more and more of these drives is because in some hard drive company some marketing genius (yeah right) thought it would be a cool idea for all these My Book type devices to work with all machines with a USB or Fire Wire connection. That’s right, your My Book can be plugged into a Linux machine and read, and it can be plugged into a Macintosh and read. Now let me ask, do you care? More than likely you do not you thought it was formatted just like your computer, with NTFS. So I recommend that when you buy one of these devices you reformat them when you get them, unless you need it to be multi platform compatible.