NTFS Driver Lands Some Late Feature Enhancements For Linux 6.12

[Danny3]

Does this new NTFS driver allow us now to copy all the folders and files from a NTFS partition with all the dates and times correctly?
It would be nice to be able to trasfer all the folders and files from a NTFS partition without losing the original cration, modified and accessed dates and times.

[[deXter]]

I wonder how to make Konstantin address this: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219123

I've written to the mailing list three times, I've emailed him personally twice, I've created a bug report. Nope. No one cares.

I use NTFS regularly and don't have this issue on 6.11.2 (Arch btw). The only time I ever get this error is when the drive is dirty - but even then, it doesn't spam my dmesg, it only generates 4-5 "correct links count" entries when attempting to mount, which is then followed by a "volume is dirty" entry. Running ntfsfix or CHKDSK fixes this for me (yes, yes I know ntfsfix doesn't actually fix corruptions, but that's a separate topic). So on an actual clean drive, I don't get any such messages. Literally just tested this whilst writing this post, performed read/write/create/delete operations and there's no spam in my dmesg.

Your issue sounds like an issue with your actual partition. You said you ran CHKDSK but in my experience it ain't 100% perfect - so I'd recommend creating a new NTFS volume (in Windows), migrate your data over, and test.

[ssokolow]

I'm pretty sure there was an answer that this behavior is intended and won't be changed. I've encountered this errors myself and indeed after checking the filesystem from windows, the errors are gone. So the real bug is, that ntfsfix doesn't notice and can't fix it. About the bugreport, this should be closed as won't fix/works.

As a UI guy, I have to say that flood of log messages fails the "Hey, NTFS, if you recognize there's a problem, then fix it already" and "Never present users non-actionable error messages. It causes notification fatigue" tests.

[Luke_Wolf]

You should be using exFat for thumb drives/external USB drives, it can be mounted and written to by every single modern OS (mac, linux, windows, android etc etc) and it doesn't have FAT's 4gb file size limit.

Hard Disagree. FAT is fragile and ExFAT has been vastly more fragile in my experience, especially when dealing with Linux even if you do everything right with telling it to unmount. NTFS sucks but it's basically the least worst filesystem to format your thumb drives in if it needs to work cross-platform because it's relatively reliable and if it breaks (which it doesn't do that often) you just fix it in the nearest Window's machine and you're good to go. If you're swapping files between Linux then just use ext4 or similar.

[mobadboy]

its pretty interesting. people always hate on windows and ntfs, but i cannot remember a single instance of ntfs with the authentic windows driver ever losing data.

meanwhile, i just lost my partition AGAIN after giving btrfs another try. single disk, no raid, no extra features, brand new machine. i just cba with that. what good is a filesystem if it's guaranteed to lose data within 1 month of real usage.

[Luke_Wolf]

its pretty interesting. people always hate on windows and ntfs, but i cannot remember a single instance of ntfs with the authentic windows driver ever losing data.

NTFS is reliable on real windows yes, the Linux drivers however are unreliable. However the reason it sucks is because on either Windows or Linux it's very very slow especially on HDDs these days which I think is intentional on Window's part.

meanwhile, i just lost my partition AGAIN after giving btrfs another try. single disk, no raid, no extra features, brand new machine. i just cba with that. what good is a filesystem if it's guaranteed to lose data within 1 month of real usage.

Low bar, btrfs is kinda known for that, try again with ext4 or xfs.

[archkde]

Does this new NTFS driver allow us now to copy all the folders and files from a NTFS partition with all the dates and times correctly?
It would be nice to be able to trasfer all the folders and files from a NTFS partition without losing the original cration, modified and accessed dates and times.

No, because copying files preserving the creation time is not a thing to begin with (on Linux at least).

[mdedetrich]

Hard Disagree. FAT is fragile and ExFAT has been vastly more fragile in my experience, especially when dealing with Linux even if you do everything right with telling it to unmount. NTFS sucks but it's basically the least worst filesystem to format your thumb drives in if it needs to work cross-platform because it's relatively reliable and if it breaks (which it doesn't do that often) you just fix it in the nearest Window's machine and you're good to go. If you're swapping files between Linux then just use ext4 or similar.

exFat is obviously more fragile than the modern filesystems that either have journaling or are CoW, but firstly if you want a filesystem that is mountable as write by default on modern operating systems you don’t have a choice.

Mac cannot mount ntfs as write easily and ext4 cannot be easily mounted in windows/mac. Also we are talking about external drives here, you don’t need such support as you shouldn’t be booting off such drives and you should be cleanly ejecting them

[avis]

I use NTFS regularly and don't have this issue on 6.11.2 (Arch btw). The only time I ever get this error is when the drive is dirty - but even then, it doesn't spam my dmesg, it only generates 4-5 "correct links count" entries when attempting to mount, which is then followed by a "volume is dirty" entry. Running ntfsfix or CHKDSK fixes this for me (yes, yes I know ntfsfix doesn't actually fix corruptions, but that's a separate topic). So on an actual clean drive, I don't get any such messages. Literally just tested this whilst writing this post, performed read/write/create/delete operations and there's no spam in my dmesg.

Your issue sounds like an issue with your actual partition. You said you ran CHKDSK but in my experience it ain't 100% perfect - so I'd recommend creating a new NTFS volume (in Windows), migrate your data over, and test.

You don't have partitions with Windows 10/11 installed on them, so there's that.

Install either, open the partition, get hundreds of these errors immediately.

This takes 20 minutes to reproduce.

[avis]

its pretty interesting. people always hate on windows and ntfs, but i cannot remember a single instance of ntfs with the authentic windows driver ever losing data.

meanwhile, i just lost my partition AGAIN after giving btrfs another try. single disk, no raid, no extra features, brand new machine. i just cba with that. what good is a filesystem if it's guaranteed to lose data within 1 month of real usage.

I've never lost a single file to NTFS. It's been nothing but rock solid.