It's interesting that you mentioned not needing to know about filesystems. About five years ago, I did a year of iPhone development and had to work on a Mac la

It's interesting that you mentioned not needing to know about filesystems. About five years ago, I did a year of iPhone development and had to work on a Mac laptop. As part of this, I needed to get some files off an external hard drive I had, except the laptop wanted to reformat the drive every time it was plugged in. My Windows laptop and my Linux machine could read the drive just fine, but the Mac (and the guys at the Genius Bar) insisted that the drive was corrupted and there was no recoverable data. Eventually wound up using a Linux machine to copy the files I needed onto a thumb drive that the Mac had personally formatted. Took about ten trips to get everything copied over. The laptop lasted a couple of years before the motherboard failed. That hard drive is still going and hasn't had a single corrupted file.