I have a home network with several Windows computers and one Linux computer (Mint Maya Cinnamon distro). When I backup the Linux computer using tar, I get a relatively large tar.gz file (1.4 GB compressed). When I then transfer that file over the network to my main data server, which is a Windows NTFS drive that I have mounted in Linux using cifs, the file becomes irrevocably corrupt. In particular, it is impossible to extract it whether I use Winrar on the Windows box or whether I transfer it back to Linux and use tar again.

This is clearly a problem with transferring from Linux to a mounted NTFS drive, because when I instead copy the tar.gz file directly from the Linux box to a USB drive formatted as FAT, then plug the USB drive into a Windows box, there is no corruption and the file extracts properly.

Does anyone know how I can solve this problem and still copy the file directly from the Linux box to a Windows NTFS drive mounted in Linux? In other words, is there a workaround? (By the way, I'm not a total Linux newbie but am not very experienced with Linux either; I guess I'm more like an advanced beginner with Linux.)

What versions of windows are running your computers and also post the output of the command smbd -V. This will tell us what version is running. samba client (cifs) is the protocol that talks with windows networks but does not actually interface with a filesystem. So it could be the samba client that is corrupting the file during the transfer process.

Have you tried copying other files to your windows computer? Are you using nautilus as your file browser? It has a samba client built in and would be interesting to see if the file is corrupted when transferred using this method.

Thanks, michaelk, for your reply. Let me start by saying that, just now, I have gotten a workaround working that is sufficient for my purposes. What I did was to install a USB hard drive on a Windows 7 computer on my network, format the drive as FAT-32, then share it. Over on the Linux side, I then mounted that USB drive as read-write. Now, when I copy the tar.gz file from Linux to to the mounted Windows share (which, again, is formatted FAT-32), it comes out non-corrupt on the Windows side. I can then, on the Windows 7 computer, copy it from the USB drive to the Windows 7 boot drive, which is NTFS, and it is still non-corrupt. The corruption seems to only occur when I mount a Windows NTFS drive in Linux, then copy a large tar.gz file directly from Linux to the mounted NTFS drive.

So I think I'm good.

To answer your questions, michaelk, and to document this problem for the future: (1) the Windows versions running on the computers in questions were Windows Home Server (which is a stripped-down Windows Server 2003), and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (the corruption occurred when copying to either of these two machines); (2) the output to command smbd -V is "Version 3.6.3"; (3) the only other files I have tried copying to the NTFS Windows shares are very small text files (shell scripts), and they copy fine with no corruption; and (4) yes, I am using Nautilus as my file browser, and all of the copying that I have done to test this problem has been from within Nautilus, rather than at the command prompt.

Are you using ntfs-3g or the in-kernel NTFS driver. I suspect the latter. Mount a NTFS drive and let us see the results of

It is a network share not a local file system so should not be a ntfs vs ntfs-3g issue.

Good point.