On 30/11/15 17:45, Peter Alefounder wrote:
> How compatible is NTFS with Linux? I am considering getting an
> external hard drive for use as a back-up device, but as far as I can
> tell, it may well have NTFS and I am not sure how easy it might be to
> re-format it. I am thinking here of characters that might or might not
> be allowed in file names, total length of file names, and what might
> happen to symbolic links. I use ext4 on my system.
>
> Would be grateful for any advice.
>
> Peter Alefounder.
>
NTFS-3G, the Linux version of NTFS, works pretty well, but it's noticeably slower that ext3/4, especially for large files. In the past I've tried using it for large backups, creating files tens of gigabytes in size, and it gets slower and slower as the file grows. Ext3 has no such problem.
NTFS also has weirdness in its filenames. NTFS filenames /are/ case-sensitive, but Windows ignores the case! And NTFS allows characters such as ':', '\', and '/', but Windows doesn't! So beware.
Once you've got the disk hooked up to Linux, there should be no problem in formatting with whatever file system you choose.
If you need to access the disk from Windows as well as Linux and want to use ext3, then projects such as
http://www.ext2fsd.com/ should do the job.
Cheers,
Chris
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