I want to move a large amount of files, some very large >10G, (videos, pictures, etc) from a windows machine to a linux machine (NTFS to EXT3) and back using a USB hard drive. Most USB hard drives are formatted FAT32 when you buy them. This limits files sizes to 4G.

Here's my question: Is there any problem with formatting the USB drive as NTFS? Does linux ever have a problem with this?

Could the drive be formatted as EXT3? Is there any utility in windows that would permit it to read a USB drive formatted as EXT3?

Also, if you want to use compression, what would be recommended if you want to compress and then uncompress the compressed file going in either direction? Windows to Linux; linux to windows....

The two machines are not in the same location and neither is portable.

Any recommendations in understanding hard drive formats and how to move large files between the two formates would be appreciated.

I believe most modern Linux distributions will read/write to NTFS partitions/drives just fine. This may vary with the distro, though.

If you can't get that to work, you could format the drive as ext3 and use something like explore2fs to view the contents under Windows.

Hope this helps

Hello Texasbugsitter,

my experience is that external harddrives with USB (not USB-Flashpens) mostly are formatted with NTFS nowadays.
The advantage of cut and paste the files from NTFS to NTFS and back will be that you will not experience any loss of the filepermissions. The same is true for Linux filesystems among each others.

It is possible to format such a drive with ext2 or ext3, this is true even for USB-flash-devices.

Markus