Files keep disappearing from Linux ext4 drive
 

So I am working on a Windows 7 machine. Through a program called MiniTool Partition Wizard I formatted a 64GB USB 3.0 ScanDisk Ultra flash drive in EXT4. Now Through a program called paragon EXTFS for Windows I downloaded some drivers that allow me to see this drive. I created a project and can drag and drop the files from my windows machine to the Linux formatted drive. It takes time for the files to copy over, they show up on the drive and I can play the video off the drive. BUT once I eject the drive and plug it back in the files completely disappear. Please help. These are for a promo at a movie theater and they are waiting for the files. Thanks for your help in advance.

Hi and welcome to LQ.

Not sure this is a Linux question.

Why do you need to format the drive this way?

A Linux system can recognize a standard FAT32 file system which natively comes with a USB stick.

Besides that Fat32 is more efficient on a USB drive, especially one less than about 90Gb.

The reason they have disappeared is that they were likely never Actually written to the drive. Windows will write to the buffers and delay writing to the actual drive until it has time to spare. It concentrates on servicing user requests first. One way to force it to write to the drive is to use the "safely remove" feature. The same would have happened under Linux if you hadn't given the system enough idle time to actually write the data.

Well they, the OP, did say they ejected the drive, which to me could mean they did the safely remove action.

My assumption is that with these various pieces of software to partition and format, something got screwed up, somehow.

I guess my continued point, and probably those who use both Win and Linux would agree.

"You do Linux stuff ... in Linux"
"You do Windows stuff ... in Windows"

You therefore do not try to create a Linux formatted drive, from within Windows, and vice versa.

you may need to check the drive.

But did they give it time to action before physically removing it??

^ This

Don't use NTFS in Linux, don't use EXT in Windows. If you need to transfer files between them and can't use one of the standard network protocols (ftp, scp, etc), use FAT32. If you need to transfer files >4GB, then your best option is to set up a virtual machine on one of the systems (either a Linux VM on a Windows host, or a Windows VM on a Linux host), and pass the drive into the VM so it can handle the filesystem natively.

Use a 'live' Linux to create & format the pendrive to ext4, then copy your project to the drive (using Linux).

(Presumably, this project is to run on a Linux machine, otherwise you're wasting your time & complicating things using a Linux filesystem.)

You could get an sbc like a raspberry pi and share the drive over samba. A little harder to setup, but you wouldn't need 3rd party tools that fail to work. Aside from putty to ssh to the pi to mount/umount assuming you didn't have the pi hooked up to anything more than ethernet.