Sharing data between Debian and NetBSD on the same machine

[Ramiro Aceves <ea1abz%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

After some time using and understanding NetBSD, I have been gaining 
confidence with the OS. I would like to progressively increase the 
importance of the tasks that NetBSD handles on my primary amd64 
daily-work machine (an Intel NUC 8i7BEH).

I have been a happy Debian user for 25 years and have accumulated around 
100 GB of genuinely useful data (schematics, web pages, programs, music 
scores, office work, RF electronics designs, simulations, PCB designs, 
documents, audio files, etc.). At the moment, I spend most of my time 
“playing” with NetBSD, but I am getting tired of rebooting into Debian 
just to perform certain tasks or simply to access some files.

I do not want to completely replace Debian, since some programs I rely 
on do not exist on NetBSD at the moment (and that would complicate my 
life too much). I also dislike the current trends in the Linux world, 
which is what originally led me to explore the BSDs. Ideally, I would 
like to maintain both operating systems with as little effort as possible.

The two internal SSDs are already full, and their partitions cannot be 
modified. Therefore, I am considering using a WD Elements 2 TB USB drive 
for this purpose. This drive would store all my useful data and would be 
regularly backed up to other drives using rsync, as I already do. Both 
operating systems will be able to read and write the files.

I initially thought about using an exFAT filesystem via FUSE, but as 
soon as I started rsyncing data from Debian to it, I encountered errors 
related to long and unusual characters in file names. Additionally, 
exFAT lacks proper permission support.

Can I use an ext2 filesystem from NetBSD with confidence? Are there any 
other good alternatives for this use case?

I would appreciate any advice.

Regards,
Ramiro