Hi all. I’ve used Linux off and on for almost two decades now but most recently in a VM. I’m thinking I might make the permanent switch sometime before Windows 10 EOL. My concern is that I have over 12TB of data spanned across many drives, all in the NTFS file system. How is NTFS compatibility nowadays? For a time, I remember it being recommended to mount NTFS as read only. It seems infeasible to convert my current data to a Linux filesystem. Thoughts?
Edit: I don’t have time to reply to everyone but thanks for the information and discussion. I’m looking to rearrange some things on my drives to free up one drive entirely and then perhaps give Fedora Linux another spin on a secondary drive along with Windows on another. If all goes well, maybe Windows will get the boot or um never booted again.
I have one SSD which I use as a data drive between both Linux and Windows. I used to run Steam games from it, but there were some small problems sometimes, so nowadays I just use it as a storage.
Generally it works just fine, but sometimes Windows does something weird with it especially when running updates, so that Linux can’t mount it. During those times I just have to boot to Windows desktop and then come back to Linux and it usually mounts again. If you totally get rid of Windows, I don’t think this will happen to you though.
Windows doesn’t shutdown completely anymore, instead it’s more similar to hibernate by default. For ntfs-3g (userspace/fuse ntfs driver) there’s the
remove_hiberfileoption, which deletes the file and might delete some temporary data. I’ve personally never lost unsaved data because of this, but I closed apps before rebooting anyway. It’s not recommend though and might not be available for the ntfs kernel driver.[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/145902/unable-to-mount-windows-ntfs-filesystem-due-to-hibernation#145904