Home / server / Questions / 158203
Accepted
Andreas Roth
Asked: 2010-07-08 05:44:01 +0800 CST

Which filesystem would you use when you need to share data between linux and windows in dual-boot setup?

  • 772

On my system i have windows 7 and ubuntu 10.04 installed.

I need to share large amounts of data between both OS. My idea is to set up a partition which both system can access and exchange data. Any suggestions which filesystem to use for this?

windows linux filesystems

5 Answers

  1. NTFS is pretty much your most problem-free option. It's used by default in Windows and Ubuntu supports it perfectly. Windows does not support any of the traditional Linux filesystems out of the box. I believe there are ext3 Windows drivers (haven't heard of any for ext4), but in my opinion filesystem drivers in Windows constitute shaky ground.

    • 3

  2. I'd recommend NTFS. You can access it from Linux using ntfs-3g, and it doesn't have any of the silly file size restrictions that FAT32 has.

    You certainly can't use any of the normal Linux filesystems - Windows can't read ext{2,3,4}, XFS, ReiserFS, btrfs, etc.

    • 2

  3. I suggest you a NTFS partition or simply make windows Partition bigger and access it from Linux.

    • 1
  4. Best Answer

    I use ext3fs and have a IFS plugin that lets Winders read it without issue (to date!). Well except if you let Windows hibernate. But who wants to waste 4 gigs of disk space just for hibernate, anyway?

    I have a 320 GB drive on my laptop, 100GB NTFS to boot Windows, and the rest is ext3fs for my Linux dual boot (OpenSuse11.2) and broken into a couple of partitions. I have the ext3fs partitions mapped as T: U: and V: drives. Have been running this way across two laptops, and three hard drives in this last one, for 4 years no, without issue.

    Though I should qualify and say that I am running in Winders XP SP3 at the moment. Not yet tried it in Win 7. Not sure if there is a 64 bit version either.

    • 1

  5. In a similar situation (with a couple of Macs in the mix as well), I just set up a NAS and shared the data through that. All three OSes can handle SMB, and Macs and Linux also do NFS natively.

    • 1