Can I make USB stick with exfat-fuse case sensitive?

Question

I have a USB stick for which I had to install exfat-fuse, and have mirrored my home diectory onto it for backup purposes with rsync. I have a folder called Documents and I notice I cannot cd documents (lower case d) but I can cd /media/bruce/STICK1/documents. Can I make exfat case-sensitive too? I can't help feeling this is going to bite me one day otherwise! Ubuntu 18.04.

Answer 1

No. Exfat is a case insensitive file system. It's a property of the file system.

Do not make backups to non-unix filesystems. You loose all properties, such as permissions and symlinks. If you need to store your backups on a non-unix-FS, you should make an tar archive:

tar cvf /home/username /path/to/destination/backup.tar

You should also reference this comparison of backup tools, which gives a great overview of the available backup tools, and their merits. This is probably a better solution than a simple copy.

Answer 2

Per the FAT standard, filenames are not case sensitive:

When searching for a file, the file name is first converted to upper case using the upcase table (file names are case insensitive) and then hashed using a proprietary patented algorithm into a 16-bit (2 byte) hash value.

Source Wikipedia exFAT

However, MAC users are reporting that FAT is case sensitive for them:

ExFAT is CASE SENSITIVE under Mac OS X!

Which means it is theoretically possible. However I have so far been unable to find a way to do this with Linux.

If you want to make a windows friendly disk that is case sensitive, you might want to consider using NTFS.