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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Is NTFS support good enough for writing? I haven't kept up. At one time you could read NTFS on Linux well enough, but writing was not supported (or was "experimental") I think mostly because the permissions attributes were quite different from the Unix approach? And also because it was reverse-engineered and not officially endorsed by MS?

Did Microsoft ever open-source the NTFS specs and drivers?

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There were a few NTFS drivers for Linux. The native ones didn't support writing, but the ntfs-3g drivers I recommended do. ntfs-3g runs on FUSE, so it's not a native kernel driver, but honestly the slowdown from running in FUSE is hardly noticeable and they've been stable for at least 10 years. So you shouldn't have any issues running ntfs-3g.

I don't know the answers to your other questions. Sorry.

Shouldn't have any issues, but don't treat it as rock-solid either. About 5 years ago ntfs-3g made a pretty big folder of mine simply disappear. To the point that when I tried a dozen recovery tools, only two of them could even see the files.

To be fair, even the most battle tested of file systems can run into occasional glitches like this when running on consumer hardware. So on any sufficiently large forum, you'll always find a few members that have experienced data loss at some point on an otherwise agreed to be stable file system driver. But for what it's worth, I've been using ntfs-3g for about 15 years and never had a single issue with it. So as much as I do sympathise with your pain, it's definitely more an edge case than the norm.

Yes, writing was the problem, not sure how good it is today

Since my main usage for external media was big files (you know, the ones with extension mov, mpg, avi, etc) using FAT32 was not a big issue (unless it was bigger than 4GB of course)

This was true 15 years ago, I hope it is not true anymore.

I know there was a way to write to ntfs from Linux, but it required to install ntfs driver file from Windows.

I hope there is a native ntfs support that supports writing.

Ntfs-3g writes fine on ntfs nowadays, WUBI even uses it for root, but there can be some edge cases still.

> I know there was a way to write to ntfs from Linux, but it required to install ntfs driver file from Windows.

That isn't true. You need to use ntfs-3g, which is a free software implementation of NTFS (that allows both reading and writing). It's been stable for 10 years. Using NTFS doesn't require anything from windows and doesn't require proprietary software.

It is true.

I stated how it was in the past[1]. Anyway according to [1], it looks like ntfs-3g still uses a proprietary version of ntfs.sys

[1] http://superuser.com/questions/139452/kernel-ntfs-driver-vs-...

I just downloaded the source for ntfs-3g[1], and it doesn't appear to have any binary blobs in it. In addition, it's under the GPLv2 so integrating proprietary components is unlikely to be legal. The answer you linked quite clearly says that the company offers a proprietary version of ntfs-3g. The answer does not say that ntfs-3g is proprietary.

Also, Trisquel (an FSF-approved GNU/Linux distribtion, meaning that it doesn't have any proprietary software within 100km of the distro) has packages for ntfs-3g[2]. So it's _definitely_ entirely free software.

So again, you're wrong on this point. In addition, I strongly believe that you were never correct on this point. Maybe you confused ntfs-3g with the proprietary version that company sells?

[1]: http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ [2]: http://packages.trisquel.info/search?keywords=ntfs&searchon=...

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