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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Current state of NTFS compatibility? (reddthat.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all. I've used Linux off and on for almost two decades now but most recently in a VM. I'm thinking I might make the permanent switch sometime before Windows 10 EOL. My concern is that I have over 12TB of data spanned across many drives, all in the NTFS file system. How is NTFS compatibility nowadays? For a time, I remember it being recommended to mount NTFS as read only. It seems infeasible to convert my current data to a Linux filesystem. Thoughts?

Edit: I don't have time to reply to everyone but thanks for the information and discussion. I'm looking to rearrange some things on my drives to free up one drive entirely and then perhaps give Fedora Linux another spin on a secondary drive along with Windows on another. If all goes well, maybe Windows will get the boot or um never booted again.

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[–] cygon 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I've used the old 'ntfs' driver that supposedly can't write to... write files ranging from 100,000+ small files in folders to individual 200+ GiB files on NTFS partitions. It works pretty well and I have used it for video editing (few huge files), software development (many tiny files), Unreal Engine + Unity, Linux Gaming w/Steam and more. Rock solid.

After hearing that the 'ntfs' driver is supposed to be read-only, I switched to 'ntfs3' instead of using 'ntfs3g' (~~same code, but compiled into the kernel instead of running outside via 'fuse'~~). From that point onwards, I've had major file system corruption nearly every day:

Copying files into folders suddenly made 90% of other files in the folder disappear. Could be fixed by copying about 1000 random files into the folder and deleting them, then the missing files would come back into existence.
Files that suddenly go bad. Can't be written to, moved or anything. Often happened in software development when compiling my project, suddenly the intermediate build directory was bust due to undeletable files.
Folders that suddenly contain themselves or one of their parent folders as sub-folders.
Folders that contain a specific file infinity times. This way, I found out that even a harmless file manager like KDE's Dolphin can become a behemoth that eats 100+ GiB of RAM and keeps trying to read the "list" of files in a directory without limit.

Personally, I'll never use 'ntfs3' for serious work again. But 'ntfs3g' is generally considered very stable, maybe my issues are specific to 'ntfs3' or my RAID setup (weird nested mdraid thanks to Intel) is to blame.

My final 'fix' was to move everything to ext4 and buy Paragon's $20 ext4 drivers for the dual boot Windows install. It's only seeing any use once every 2 months. Sadly, these drivers are case sensitive even on Windows, rendering Bethesda games unplayable when installed on those partitions, for example.

[–] aksdb 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I switched to 'ntfs3g' or rather, it's 'ntfs3' variant (same code, but compiled into the kernel instead of running outside via 'fuse')

They are not the same code. They are completely independent code bases by different devs. ntfs-3g is developed by tuxera, ntfs3 by Paragon. The latter also maintain a proprietary ntfs driver for a long time.

In my experience ntfs3 is a little faster, but also more unstable. ntfs-3g gave me zero corruptions in years, ntfs3 on the other hand needs a chkdsk run every few days.

[–] cygon 3 points 9 months ago

Oh my, thank you very much for pointing that out!

I might have to give it another chance, then, perhaps I'll shift my games partition back to NTFS once I can free up enough space.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I also recommend to stay away from NTFS3. I had some files that i couldn't empty from the recycle bin, they just keep reappearing.

After a while NTFS3 straight up give up, it couldn't mount the partition due to NTFS errors. At this point NTFS3g still worked, and i moved everything to an ext4 partition.