Camera SD card under OpenBSD

As file sizes increasingly become bigger in cameras such as Go Pro and Canon EOS D, the FAT file system has become unfit for purpose.  As such, instead of looking to an open source file system (probably due to no support in the Windows or Mac platforms), these camera manufacturers have just done a bump to a more recent version of a Microsoft proprietary file system, exFAT.

While exFAT gets over the limitations of the original FAT file system, space and file sizes, it still causes issues with open source operating systems such as OpenBSD.

Fortunately, OpenBSD has a FUSE implementation allowing the mounting of all weird and wonderful file systems without the licensing headaches.

For me, this means I don’t have to have Windows around to transfer my pictures or video files (editing is a whole other story and is known as a ‘Basket Case’ when it comes to video) from my Go Pro or Canon EOS 80D.

On OpenBSD, simply install the exfat-fuse package:

# pkg_add -v exfat-fuse

Once that is installed, you can simply mount your SD media:

# mount.exfat /dev/sd2i /mnt/sd

(substitute sd2i with whatever your device mounts and reports as in dmesg).

You can then use whatever method you like to move the data from your storage card to your local machine. Un-mount as you normally would before removing your SD card from your system.