Linux file system that can share between windows and linux

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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I have a new 4tb ssd drive that is replacing my spinning rust storage drive. I would like to put a file system for linux and can work with windows. I am currently using Fedora 39 as my browsing/coding profile. I plan to switch to linux (probably nobara or arch for gaming/streaming) when Windows 10’s reaches EOL.

Crawling the web, a lot of posts suggest NTFS, as there is support with ntfs-3g
https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/j8jcuq/best_filesystem_for_use_with_both_linux_and/g8bktpy/

The other suggested file system is btrfs and installing a custom driver for windows which I know @jode is familiar with

Another suggestion is exFAT. Given your experiences and my use case of having the drive as a mass storage drive. Should I switch to btrfs or stick with NTFS?

For reference, I cloned the original 1tb drive to the 4tb drive. A potential solution is to take the 3tb partition, make it a linux file system, copy the data from the 1tb partition, and reclaim the original to the new.

fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 3.73 TiB, 4096805658624 bytes, 8001573552 sectors
Disk model: T-FORCE T253TY00
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x6070a6be

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1        2047 1953521663 1953519617 931.5G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        2048 1953521663 1953519616 931.5G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
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I’ve never tried btrfs on Windows, so I’m not sure how that fairs, but exFAT is what most external drives are formatted for to work between Windows and Unix systems (MacOS included). I have in the past used ntfs-3g back when I tried dual booting Ubuntu and Windows 7 and it worked fine. You can’t really go wrong with either of those as exFAT maxes out at 128 PetaBytes and NTFS maxes out at 16 ExaBytes volume size. lol

What is your current file system on Fedora? If you happened to choose btrfs (or want to in the future), then I’d give that a shot as I believe btrfs can only backup to and from btrfs, if you’re using something like Timeshift.

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:astonished: if one is willing to use the command line, backups to and from btrfs are elementary.

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What does using the command line have to do with btrfs only working with other btrfs volumes for backup?

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I say exFAT unless you have a specific use case that would prevent you using that fs. Used to use ntfs for my external storage drives (HDDs), but after several file corruptions when interacting with my Linux machines I switched to exFAT.

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based on the output, looks like it is ext4
this website gave the following

 lsblk -f
NAME                            FSTYPE      FSVER    LABEL       UUID                                   FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                             ext4        1.0      MassStorage b6830460-34a7-4597-a3d8-5fb94bb665d3                  
├─sda1                                                                                                                 
└─sda5                          ntfs                 MassStorage 0A04673E04672C3F                                      
sdb                                                                                                                    
├─sdb1                          ntfs                             F0F26520F264EC72                                      
└─sdb2                          ntfs                             847238E77238DF9A                                      
sdc                                                                                                                    
└─sdc1                          ntfs                 GameZ Drive 0E9E44409E442297                                      
sdd                                                                                                                    
sde                                                                                                                    
sdf                                                                                                                    
sdg                                                                                                                    
sr0                                                                                                                    
zram0                                                                                                                  [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                                                                                                
├─nvme0n1p1                     vfat        FAT32                6542-F15B                               579.8M     3% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2                     ext4        1.0                  08fa06a0-672f-4231-b84e-b3ca6a832cbe    299.2M    62% /boot
├─nvme0n1p3                     LVM2_member LVM2 001             UwB9Uf-03PH-pbh8-q0F8-WllR-h8FN-Sh4PzL                
│ ├─fedora_localhost--live-root ext4        1.0                  19ef8134-2f63-4c22-ba02-e0cf0409e853     15.1G    73% /
│ ├─fedora_localhost--live-swap swap        1                    f6ed0d66-b805-4eb4-86ee-9e1245539caf                  [SWAP]
│ └─fedora_localhost--live-home ext4        1.0                  c60a9949-e17f-46a3-be7b-7c51e346113a       83G    41% /home
└─nvme0n1p4                     LVM2_member LVM2 001             8t13xm-NHfU-qhbS-j8NG-6ztw-wnoL-zHelot                
  ├─fedora_localhost--live-root ext4        1.0                  19ef8134-2f63-4c22-ba02-e0cf0409e853     15.1G    73% /
  └─fedora_localhost--live-home ext4        1.0                  c60a9949-e17f-46a3-be7b-7c51e346113a       83G    41% /home

based on these responses, I guess I’ll use exFAT

is the workflow to make the 3tb partition exFAT, copy the files from the NTFS partition, then delete the ntfs partition and add the space to the exFAT partition?

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I don’t currently have a way to test if exFAT can be expanded. You could use GParted or another partition manager (I don’t know what comes with Fedora) to create a 1TB partition, write it, and then see if it will allow you to expand to the remaining 2TB; if so, then yes, that will work fine.

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I took it that your statement implied that a tool like Timeshift is necessary to backup to and from btrfs, reading it as “can only backup … using something like Timeshift”.

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I probably should have put a comma before “if”. It made sense in my head. :stuck_out_tongue:

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https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/18cix5r/is_exfat_the_best_option_for_cross_macwindows/kcb5kht/
hmmm now this is swinging the pendulum back to btrfs

Looking at btrfs. This repo has the driver for btrfs

which links to this repo for converting a ntfs to btrfs app.

I’m going to go with btrfs because it has journals so if the drive does get corrupted it will be easier to recover data. I’ll probably start a new post for migrating my drive

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turned it into a guide

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Without any context I’d say that the quote above is possibly something to have in mind at best, you will get corrupted removal media at some point most likely not due to the file system however but the device itself or users just yanking the device (which will very likely cause issues irregardless of file system at some point). Given that you have hundreds of millions using exFAT each day you can likely assume that it’s stable at this point.

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Yeah it was in the context of portable backup drives.

Though browsing some threads, btrfs isn’t as resilient as I thought on windows
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/18nrtpg/shared_filesystem_with_windows_exfat_ntfs_or_btrfs/kecsl6e/

You can use a Btrfs shared filesystem together with WinBtrfs. But be sure to have a very stable windows system. In my case a sudden reboot due to a windows crash led to a corrupted filesystem on my shared Btrfs drive. The reconstruction of my files was quite a challenge. But due to the superior file system security features of Btrfs i was able to recover nearly all of my files.

Seems that random shutdowns both exFAT and btrfs leads to corrupted file systems, but btrfs has a better design making it easier to recover from

https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/general/what-are-the-most-robust-file-systems/

I tried exFAT, but I didn’t like how my ssd showed up as a flash drive. With btrfs, once I migrated to it, all my mounts got updated, so the process of configuring it after the migration was a lot simpler. With exFAT there was a bigger unknown with the workflow

Doing a quick web search, there doesn’t appear to be any good tools to migrate NTFS to exFAT

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I looked up UDF, it looks similar to exFAT in that they are designed to be used with disks/flash storage.

See the same reason why I didn’t opt for exFAT

Furthermore, the support to converting NTFS to UDF Isn’t as developed as btrfs.

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NTFS is the safe bet here, format with Windows. exFAT is possible but slow compared to NTFS. I would recommend ext4 over both though, if it is a permanent drive - ext4 comes with a bit more layers and protections. Too bad Windows does not have support for ZFS, that is the obvious choice :slight_smile:

One thing to consider taking the plunge on if you are going to do a lot of back and forth is a small NAS, it will set you back maybe $300 or so but well worth the investment and is so much less hassle.

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ZFS, ext4, and exFAT would make sense if I had a NAS as I could copy the files temporarily and restore them.

I ultimately chose btrfs as it can nondestructively convert my NTFS drive to btrfs. Looking online, none of the suggested filesystems had a way to convert without data duplication.

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I’ve used btrfs on my NAS server. Never had a problem with it, but I’ve also read that updates and incompatibility between platform versions has cause people major btrfs corruption. This was a little while ago and may have been overstated (implosions always rise in the alarm stack). exFAT is the most compatible but is has no logs, metadata backups (it is a FAT), or copy-on-write. If you can get NTFS to work reliably in read-write, you might reconsider that.

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Yep, before I switched used ntfs-3g, which worked and was previously installed with Fedora. When I upgraded my ssd, I took it as a opportunity to try something a new open source filesystem and not rely on Microsoft and community workarounds for a proprietary filesystem. Perhaps I might switch back if Microsoft opens the filesystem

See the post linked

rambling tangent

Although not intended, I got exposed to some new tools to repairing corrupted file systems. To be honest, I still can’t explain how I was able to stay calm, avoid panicking and make a mistake that have cost me my data. Maybe it might be experience: solving tougher development problems; or borking my Linux install previously; or being comfortable with Linux; or knowing it is possible to recover data (I am reminded of @wendell’s video recovering Linus’s data).

Maybe it was the reassurance that a llm would be able to summarize my issue into a seo search query to solve the problem.

It might be both.

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