ntfs or fat32 for usb?

I use fat32, but I'd think maybe NTFS is a better call, I dunno though.

do you need to access comps with Linux/Mac/BSD and so on on it?
Do you wanna risk the permissions feature of ntfs turning against you?

If yes to the 1st and(or) second question use FAT32.

But if you don't want the risk of huge files or apps growing into space hogs I suggest ntfs.

NTFS does journaling and thus works the USB drive harder. If you're concerned about the life of the drive I don't recommend it.

Ed

some say that ntfs is harder to recover from if things get messed up.

I'll give you some info, and you can decide. After all, you know what you need.

NTFS:
Features that FAT32 doesn't have include journaling and permissions. Journaling makes the filesystem more stable and less-error prone, and errors are easier to fix. Some utilities can easily repair even severe damage. Of course, journaling causes more writes and can be a bit slower, and allocates drive space for itself (about 8MB). POSIX-style and Windows permissions are preserved, but this can be a double-edged sword: you may lock yourself out! If you plan to use it portably and want to use NTFS, format the drive (after backing up your info, of course) to FAT32 (if it not already formatted FAT or FAT32 and use the convert utility (command-line) to format to NTFS like this:
convert /FS:NTFS /X /V /NoSecurity
/X forces Windows to unmount the drive, /V makes it verbose, and /NoSecurity makes it ignore permissions, but this is only guaranteed on Windows; Linux and OS X may preserve the permissions.

NTFS is recommended if you stick to Windows, and are worried about filesystem damage.

FAT32:
Pretty stable, but filesystem damage may force you to format. Severe damage will not likely be fixable. Permissions are never preserved on any system, since FAT32 does not have the capability to store the information. Very little space is allocated to the FAT itself, so you'll have a little more space. A limitation of FAT32 is that the file system itself cannot be bigger than 4GB, and no file can be bigger than 2GB. Of course, since your drive only has a capacity of 2GB, it's irrelevant in this case. Another thing to note, however, is the larger cluster size of FAT32. A cluster is the absolute smallest amount of space that can be used when writing a file. NTFS has a cluster size of 4KB, which means that a file with a size of 4KB or less will occupy 4KB of space on the disk. This is the difference between "size" and "size on disk". More info here: https://portableapps.com/node/2257

FAT32 is recommended if you want to guarantee access to your files, and the size limitations don't hamper you.

For a 2GB flash drive, I recommend FAT32.

NTFS will wear down your flash-drive faster
than FAT because it is a journalling file-system
and, as such, reads and writes to files much more often than other
file systems like FAT and FAT32.
This is because disk transactions are logged separately
on the disk as they occur.

So, unless you need the functions of NTFS, stick with FAT.

Personally, I use a USB portable hard drive, instead of a flash drive. I chose NTFS since I use robocopy.exe to mirror all of my files to a backup site. When I started off, I used FAT32, but Robocopy was having trouble with date/time comparisons between my drive and the backup (which was NTFS). After I reformatted my portable to NTFS, I haven't had problems.

FAT32 has a maximum Filesystem Size of 200GB, and a maximum File size of 4GB.