From: Nico Kadel-Garcia on
On Jun 1, 9:51 pm, "Nasser M. Abbasi" <n...(a)12000.org> wrote:
> Hello;
>
> Which you think would be better:
>
> I have some data on an ext3 file system. I want to use this data when I
> am on my windows PC also.
>
> I could do one of the the following:
>
> 1. Since linux support NTFS writing these days, I can create an NTFS
> disk, and copy the data to it while I am on linux. Then boot to windows
> and access this disk (it is USB disk), so I can read it from that disk
> to my windows disk.
>
> 2. Leave the data in the ext3 USB disk, and use some utilities I saw on
> the net which is suppose to allow one to mount ext3 disk on windows.
>
> Then from windows, read the data out from ext3 to a windows disk. Such
> tools I saw in this article in Linux Journalhttp://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9449(3 years old). and googling
> around there seem to be other tools.
>
> What is the more reliable way? on windows, I will be just
> reading/copying the data from ext3 disk, not writing back to ext3 disk.
>
> I think option 1 is the easiest and may be safest?
>
> thanks
> --Nasser

NTFS handles both symlynks and hardlinks rather differently than
Linux. I'd suggest that you run a pair of git repositories and
transfer the data both ways, with source control and version tracking,
and use whatever local file system you prefer.
From: Doug Freyburger on
Denis McMahon wrote:
> Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
>
>> I have some data on an ext3 file system. I want to use this data when I
>> am on my windows PC also.
>
> I use vfat / fat32 formatted disks for this.

When possible I prefer using a CIFS mount on the Linux box to get the
NTFS data over the net from the Windows box. It lets the Windows box do
what it specializes in - Windows stuff. It lets the Linux box do what
it specializes in - Running all sorts of random interface code.

Exporting the ext3 data over SAMBA to the Windows box works but does not
perform as well and SAMBA goes through phases of falling between on
Windows changes (feel free to call this a deliberate strategy on the
part of Microsoft if you wish).

Exporting the ext3 data over NFS to the Windows box running an NFS
package performs better but over time PC NFS packages have gone through
flakey phases.

Exporting the NTFS data over NFS from the Windows box also has a history
of flakey phases.

When I don't have a network mount as an option like in a home system
dual boot, I go with Denis M's suggestion to format the stick in fat32
format. I have one of those in my pocket right now.
From: Frank Steinmetzger on
Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:

> Hello;
>
> Which you think would be better:
>
> I have some data on an ext3 file system. I want to use this data when I
> am on my windows PC also.

I'm running dual boot here and don't use a dedicated share partition. Since
I use Linux most of the time, I have all important stuff on my Ext3
partitions (a music partition, my X-Plane partition and of course my home
partition with all my photos etc). The only stuff on NTFS is Windows' C
drive and my old Data partition from Windows-only times, which now mostly
holds Windows games.

The only drawbacks this way:
- no file time preservation if I write to NTFS under linux. This is not nice
for when I wanna know from when a file is (statistics, photo management
etc). Solution: don't copy it to NTFS in Linux, but instead the next time
I'm in Windows. I don't bother much about losing permissions on NTFS,
since the two systems' permissions schemes are too different anyway.
- My NTFS games partition is mostly compressed, so overwriting a file or
resaving may its directory fail.
- Writing to ext3 in Windows gives me files with root:root ownership, which
is easily fixed (much easier that this clunky windows file permissions
dialogue). I'm not sure about file time stamps at the moment.

I'm using Ext2FSD¹ to access my Ext3 partitions in Windows. Its advantage
over IFSDrives (which I used prior) is that it supports custom encoding of
filenames. This rid me of encoding issues when I finally switched my entire
Linux over to UTF8. Its setup behavior is a little buggy, but I haven't
noticed any problems yet.

_________________
¹ http://ext2.yeah.net
--
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