Hi All,

I am still a newbie here, but I keep seeing mentioned the reliability, or lack of, using ntfs directories.

What are the issues?

I still have most of my data stored on ntfs because I am a newbie, and still use XP. The little I have used ntfs with Linux, I have had no issues at all. I can read and write fine using ntfsconfig. Are there issues with losing data? With reliability of files being corrupted after writing to ntfs?

It is not yet a big issue for me, just curious what I should be aware of.

Thanks

When ntfs-3g was unstable there were concerns, now it is stable and claims to have no more issues. I've been using it for a few months, the only issue I have is with firefox/iceweasel where when downloading binaries into my ntfs data partition, the extension of the file is extended to ".rpm.rpm" or ".deb.deb". I use a handy command to address that and correct all files with this double extension thing. The other problem I've had was when I saved some web pages with "Web page Complete" and some of the flash ads could not be deleted either through Linux or Windows when deleting the web page.
EDIT: As long as you're running a kernel 2.6.20 and above which has the proper version of fuse which was the culprit causing some ntfs issues in previous kernels.

The unsettling thing, to me, about NTFS and Linux is simply that the driver-support for this format has (afaik...) been reverse-engineered, not provided by Microsoft. I'm just not comfortable running critical data in such a situation.

I think that the wisest thing to do is to let each operating system use "it's own most-native format, whatever that is," for its information. When they need to share information on an ongoing operational basis, either use network sharing or find a common file-system format that both of them support. Remember that Windows also has "installable file system" (IFS) support...