The New NTFS Driver Looks Like It Will Finally Be Ready With Linux 5.15

[Slartifartblast]

maybe NTFS is losing its popularity among the device manufacturers so it was not so profitable for paragon to continue selling this driver as a proprietary product. On other hand, they're getting a lot of (good) PR from this story. Also, looks like the person sending these patches isn't just a developer, but an owner of this company. So he's doing it simply because he can, why not?

I think it had a lot more to do with exFAT, so Paragon went FU to MS.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/the-exfat-filesystem-is-coming-to-linux-paragon-softwares-not-happy-about-it/

[StarterX4]

Finally. It took a long time to mainline it.

[Old Grouch]

exFAT is (good) for removable storage and file archiving. It can't and won't work for storing anything which requires MAC, so NTFS is as relevant as ever.

exFAT is lousy for file archiving.

The problem is that ext(x) filesystems allow any character in a filename except for NULL and forward slash, which is a superset of the allowed characters in the exFAT definition:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification#table-35-invalid-filename-characters

For example: Asterisk; Less-than sign; Greater-than sign; Colon; Question mark; Vertical bar; and Back slash are not allowed in exFAT filenames (plus sundry control codes)

I've been caught out by this and had to rename a non-trivial number of files.

Similar restrictions apply to NTFS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win.../naming-a-file - note that if NTFS uses the POSIX namespace any Unicode character except / and Null are is allowed. Note that the POSIX standard for portable filenames is considerably more restrictive.

Non-Microsoft drivers can put non-standard characters in filenames used in exFAT, but obviously this will generate undefined behaviour if accessed by a Microsoft driver, or one written to abide by the Microsoft specification.

I'm not going to hold up the relatively liberal approach of many Linux filesystems towards filename standards as being perfect. It is subject to well argued criticisms: https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-u...filenames.html

I'm still looking for a good cross-platform approach for file archiving. exFAT isn't the solution, and neither, unfortunately, is UDF (in any of its revisions), which is a shame.

[Nille]

but damn Android has to do weird shit and ONLY allows storage it has formatted itself? Why can't phones be normal...

It depends on the manufacturer. I used Motorola and Samsung so fair and they where perfectly fine with all filesystems that i give them. the older devices didnt like the exfat but the devices didnt support sdxc on paper.

[pipe13]

CommunityMember birdie stormcrow Nille : Thanks for your informative responses!

[xeekei]

This is great news.

And on exFAT, I'm using it between Linux and Windows, but damn Android has to do weird shit and ONLY allows storage it has formatted itself? Why can't phones be normal...

[Nille]

Given exFAT has advantages over FAT, in what ways does it or can it replace NTFS? I've always (perhaps mistakenly) thought all the FATs were somewhat toys compared to journaling filesystems such as NTFS, EXT4, HFS, and their ilk. (And where does f2fs fit in?) My question is what use cases do Paragon's paying customers have that previously required NTFS but now can at least get by with exFAT, use cases that with earlier FATs could not?

There driver was probably used in Settop boxes etc. for access usb sticks and external drives. exfat has the benefit that is implemented by all major operating systems and is a requirement for SDXC Flash Cards.

[kbios]

(ext4) journalling does not protect you from data loss - it only makes fsck run faster and in a perfect world you must always run fsck even if you have journalling but your system crashed for some reasons.

The data=journal mode absolutely protects from data loss

[stormcrow]

I agree. In that regard I've a question about Michaels final dig: "but these days NTFS is of declining relevance to companies now focused on exFAT and other file-system options, which has led [Paragon] to be open to upstreaming their code."

Given exFAT has advantages over FAT, in what ways does it or can it replace NTFS? I've always (perhaps mistakenly) thought all the FATs were somewhat toys compared to journaling filesystems such as NTFS, EXT4, HFS, and their ilk. (And where does f2fs fit in?) My question is what use cases do Paragon's paying customers have that previously required NTFS but now can at least get by with exFAT, use cases that with earlier FATs could not?

For the record, I'm really looking forward to Paragon's new NTFS3 for my own development and testing efforts split between Windows and Linux. I'm using ntfs-3g on a shared SDD, but have had to duplicate much of my effort onto a linux-only ext4 partition simply because fuse is too slow.

exFAT can't and won't replace NTFS. They aren't in the same league and don't address the same issues. NTFS will be around for as long as Windows is, and many users will need to have proper read support in what ever OSes are being used for even longer. What do their paying customers get? Most hard drives, internal or external, from the Windows world are NTFSnot exFAT. It's only flash storage such as sticks and SD cards that are exFAT. Not only do I hope to see this effort do well, I hope they take the lessons learned with this project and apply it to improve the MacOS version the NTFS product. Reliable read and write support helps a lot of industries that don't want to deal with Windows but have to interoperate with it.

[birdie]

I hope you have a robust backup system

(ext4) journalling does not protect you from data loss - it only makes fsck run faster and in a perfect world you must always run fsck even if you have journalling but your system crashed for some reasons.