Changing from Win8 to LinuxMint and dealing with data
 

I'm going (back) to Linux. I used to use Ubuntu quite a few years back, but this time I'm going with Linux Mint. It's been quite a while, so I'm a little (lot) rusty.

This is what I have:

1 Win8 laptop with a 1TB HD (which will be a 128GB SSD before long)
1 WinXP? netbook with a 20GB HD
1 external HD 1TB (full)
1 external HD 1TB (empty)

everything is in NTFS format. My plan is to swap out the laptop HD with the SSD, store the old HD, and set the new HD up for Linux Mint. The netbook is going to stay Windows format for now, until I'm sure I'm up to speed with Linux, then I will eventually switch that over (probably to mint as well).

What I need to do is to convert the externals to presumably ext3 and keep the data. When I did my last conversion, I was able to dump everything on a server, convert everything at once, then grab it back. I don't have that option this time. I'm not sure the best way to sort out this situation and save all the data.

But wait, there's more. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that Linux can read NTFS, but Win can't read ext3. If that's the case, that might be my solution there. But, if not, I still need to be able to read other NTFS formatted HDs. Is this going to be possible?

Thanks for reading, and thanks for any advice.

ntfs-3g will give you read/write access to ntfs partitions fine and dandy.

And to second that, Mint should mount the external NTFS disk(s) when you plug it/them in. Simple.

So then should I just keep the external HDs NTFS so I can use them from other computers?

That's about the top and bottom of it. Of course, if you decide to switch to linux exclusively, the native filesystems are better (preserving file permissions, etc) but for day to day use you should be fine.

I would stick with file systems that are common to multiple operating systems for external drives. ntfs and (sometimes) fat32 fit the bill. I've been using ntfs on large external harddrives, fat32 on usb sticks (which are usually the default formats at time of purchase) with multiple debian and windows systems with no ill effects.