I just got a new Western Digital MyBook free-standing hard drive. Unlike my previous one, this one came formatted as exFat rather than NTFS. I now see that Windows 10 says it cannot store a system image on the drive because it is not NTFS. I suppose
I can reformat the drive into NTFS, but I'm curious why MS wouldn't allow this operation to work in exFat. And ideas???? Thanks.
NTFS is the native format of Microsoft Windows. It allows the most control, including security (file/folder permissions) that exFAT would not provide. Microsoft decided they would only store it on NTFS - there may be no other reason that that - their product,
their decision how it works. Sure, at one time it was touted as being the 4GB file size limit... but the fact exFAT can now do that too may have just not been written into the checks for SYSTEM IMAGE or the decision was made to not bother. *shrug*
If you want a backup stored on a differently formatted drive, use
something else.
