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.

    • Supermariofan67@programming.dev
      0·
      9 months ago

      Please do not use exfat on anything critical. It is slow as hell, it does not have journal or CoW to ensure consistency on unintended shutdown, and is designed to be extremely simple to implement, not robust. Good for flash drives and sd cards, but not normal storage.

    • db2@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 months ago

      Now I want to try that though. As long as it’s baked in to the kernel it should theoretically work…

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        0·
        9 months ago

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Linux

        Lots of different drivers, basically all reverse engineered. Different actions supported, macOS doesnt give a f* and just supported read (at some time some user wrote that) and Linux had no support for some advanced functions that are unstable.

        The latter scenario could lead to a filesystem being corrupted and thus not usable, as it has no full compatibility.

        Like, it is probably possible but just no. You are using reverse engineered drivers and there are better alternatives that are more stable (nouveau, Asahi, always exceptions).

        • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          The new kernel driver is a mess and isn’t really being maintained. The FUSE driver is the only one that’s actually usable and even then, it can cause corruption in certain conditions. It’s still best to mount read only whenever possible.

          • db2@lemmy.world
            0·
            9 months ago

            You guys are misunderstanding the purpose, I don’t want to (necessarily) get a stable system out of it, I want to watch how it fails over time.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I recently tried to install Linux to NTFS. I had a lot of trouble getting the initramfs to mount the root partition and gave up eventually.

        I’m sure it can be done, but it wasn’t as easy as I hoped it would be. I think most distros still prefer the old userland NTFS driver over the in-kernel one.

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            0·
            9 months ago

            Obviously it’s a terrible idea to run any production system on NTFS. It was just an experiment in a VM, I wanted to see how many operating systems I could boot from a single system partition.

            BTRFS worked better than NTFS, but unfortunately the open source Windows bootloader that made it possible doesn’t work on modern versions of Windows anymore.