Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Feb 2007 16:50 UTC, submitted by Dominique
General Development The open source, freely available, stable read/write NTFS driver, NTFS-3G 1.0 has just been released. The driver, released half year ago for beta testing, made progress, thanks to ten or even hundreds of thousands testers, early adopters, and developers. In consequence of the open communications and positive experiences, NTFS-3G is available for over 60 Linux distributions today, including most major ones. Moreover it was ported to new operating systems like FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku, and Mac OS X.
Thread beginning with comment 215227
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
symlinks
by evert on Wed 21st Feb 2007 18:07 UTC
evert
Member since:
2005-07-06

The man pages of ntfs-3g say they support symbolic links (softlinks / symlinks). I guess that creating a symlink on a ntfs partition will work in linux, but not in windows? Windows softlink support is very limited.

I'm planning to move all my data to a new harddisk, and I'm still unsure about which filesystem to use. Both windows and linux must access the data. Ext2 drivers exists for windows, but matt's driver lacks networking support and stefan's driver has no unicode support. Both lack softlink support. (It would be great if symlinks would show up as .LNK files in windows, but such a feature would require another layer, and probably slow down the driver.)

RE: symlinks
by smitty on Wed 21st Feb 2007 19:02 in reply to "symlinks"
smitty Member since:
2005-10-13

I don't think the OS has anything to do with whether symlinks work or not, it is purely the file system. NTFS does have support for them they just aren't exposed by the windows ui. How are they limited? I don't know too much about them except that they exist.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE[2]: symlinks
by ubit on Wed 21st Feb 2007 20:18 in reply to "RE: symlinks"
ubit Member since:
2006-09-08

They are limited in XP and 2k so that you can't symlink a folder from a network drive, eg: \compmy folder -> C:my folder won't work.

I always though it was so people didn't use thin clients and presumably so MS gets more licenses by not allowing this, but they fixed it in Vista. At least for administrators, because users with regular privileges can't use symlinks.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

RE: symlinks
by overflow on Thu 22nd Feb 2007 09:43 in reply to "symlinks"
overflow Member since:
2007-02-22

Does NTFS-3G need regular defragging just like the original? And does it slowly grind to a halt as the disk fills up - like the original?

For resilience, NTFS is a great FS but it is slow and high maintenance.

I think I'd stick with native Linux file systems and share with Windows using Samba.

This has to be great for disaster recovery (for disasters such as "Oh my god! I've accidentally installed Windows")

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2