How should I move files NTFS and XFS

[Rogue-agent]

Hello world,

I already talked about this a little over on another topic, but it is off topic.

I have files on my NTFS drive and these I want to transfer to another drive because I should use Linux and that supposedly hasn’t good enough support for NTFS.

I have an already formatted XFS HDD where all the files fit in.

The files that I already moved have a newer creation date than modified date. In Linux it shows creation date as “unknown” in the NTFS drive.

I want to preserve all meta data as it would be easier to find files. When sorting by age.

I have an Arch system, Fedora and Debian based live CDs. I also have a laptop with Win11 because Grub efi not found after hibernation

I have an M.2 usb adapter but the Windows bootloader isn’t recognized for some reason (using back panel and USB3 cable). I also have a SATA adapter to USB.

How should I proceed ?

[LeeTalbert]

On your Arch Linux system do sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g to have decent ntfs support. It won’t be perfect, but it will work. As far as I know, the birth time is filesystem specific, so when copying the files to XFS they technically have a new birth time.

[Rogue-agent]

I do already have NTFS installed. The thing is that I need to transfer the files to reformat the disk for other purposes.

[LeeTalbert]

I’m pretty sure NTFS and XFS use different methods of measuring birth, and they don’t translate between each other.

[Adubs]

You want to use rsync with the archive flag (-a). This will retain all metadata and permissions to the best of its ability.

[bedHedd]

@Rogue-agent

I have files on my NTFS drive and these I want to transfer to another drive because I should use Linux and that supposedly hasn’t good enough support for NTFS

If you were using btrfs, I would have suggested ntfs2btrfs.

GitHub - maharmstone/ntfs2btrfs

I did it here

bedHedd's ntfs to btrfs adventure: log/guide

steps for how to convert a windows ntfs drive to linux btrfs navigate to the ntfs2btrfs repo download and install it for your OS. This guide will use Fedora. Open a new terminal dnf install ntfs2btrfs in root/sudo get the name of the ntfs partition to convert write it down if needed lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM …

@Adubs

You want to use rsync with the archive flag (-a). This will retain all metadata and permissions to the best of its ability.

Otherwise follow what Adubs suggested with rsync

Having gone through this process, I’d highly recommend you get a second storage drive and have rescuezilla create a copy of your data so that you have any data loss

[vad]

GNU cp has an -a archive flag too to “preserve attributes”. Rsync is fancier though. And you’d want proper handling for symbolic and hard links inside the target file system and I bet rsync is the only one that may have an option for this.