[reh321]

Our main family computer is a Ubuntu Linux box built by our daughter from a gaming computer "retired" by her fiance, a new disk drive, and various components from our old Win8 desktop. I also have a Win7 laptop computer and a WinRT tablet. I have several disk drives that I share amongst the three different computers - several external drives I use for periodic backup and several "thumb drives" I use to hold data. I've been formatting drives as NTFS, and so far that has been acceptable to all three of my computers.

[clickclick]

I think in the long run, NTFS will be less painful than your other choices, and I think less likely to leave you in a bottleneck going forward at some unforeseen point. As already mentioned, be careful with disk checking utilities. You probably are safest making your NTFS partitions under Windows and running your disk utilities from there. Granted it's been awhile, but I've had some interesting issues from partition boundaries put down by *nix oses that are then manipulated from a Windows system by either native or third party disk utilities. Something that is easy to overlook that I find can cause great headaches, especially when sharing between operating systems, is spaces in file names. Don't do it! Use an underscore or some other character, but nuke spaces. Life will be much happier, or should I say the ugly potential will not be nearly as great.

[RGlasel]

Something I haven't seen mentioned is running either Windows or Linux in a virtual machine, so you have both OS's running at the same time. Samba won't work otherwise, because it needs to run in Linux in order to share files with Windows. My suggestion is to run Windows in a virtual machine and format the second hard drive in NTFS. Wndows will have the fewest problems that way and Linux is more adaptable than Windows.

[clackers]

Reading's never the issue, Mike, it's whether corruption will be done to the file system by a third party driver. As you've seen, if you act as the root user you'll read everything on the NTFS disk because the driver ignores the file permission streams.

Once upon a time, the NTFS driver was considered too unreliable on Linux for writing … and the Mac version still is. But that was years ago, I'm sure it's fine now, NTFS has hardly changed in the last decade, although SMB has.

[tuco]

You're over thinking it. Keep it simple. While FAT32 may have limitations among all the file systems out there, it is the lowest common denominator. No drivers, everyone can read/write to it and it will hold files for sharing and storage good enough.

[BigMackCam]

Thanks for all the input so far, folks.

NTFS still sounds like the most preferable solution to me due to fewer limitations than FAT32, yet still good overall support by Linux. But all this feedback is making me wonder if I might be taking risks by sharing my main storage space and working on important files from both operating systems.

Since most of my work will undoubtedly be in Linux, I'm thinking I might divide up my 2TB data storage HDD with a 1.5GB ext4 partition for Linux use only, a 256MB NTFS partition for Windows 10 only, and a 256GB FAT32 or NTFS partition for shared use by both operating systems. If I need to work on files in both Windows 10 and Linux, I can create copies of them in the shared partition, and work on them safe in the knowledge that if any problems should arise, I at least have the originals in either my Windows 10 or Linux areas.

Does this sound like a sensible solution, or am I worrying too much and over-engineering the solution?

[clickclick]

Does this sound like a sensible solution, or am I worrying too much and over-engineering the solution?

I'd say if it isn't too much of a PITA, it certainly lets you try the concept pretty risk free, and if you got the urge later, you could certainly rearrange/partition things with the help of an external USB drive for some temporary storage if needed, since you are planning on having the program and operating systems separate from your data drive(s) (and that would be the tricky part to deal with if you wanted to start manipulation files systems etc. after your initial setup).

[jbinpg]

Remember that the only realistic solution to possible data mishaps is to have a good backup strategy in hand before setting out. Living without backups will inevitably bite you in the a**.

Jack

[BigMackCam]

Remember that the only realistic solution to possible data mishaps is to have a good backup strategy in hand before setting out. Living without backups will inevitably bite you in the a**.

Jack

I agree, Jack. I'm pretty good with my backups. Not squeaky clean, if I'm honest... Under Mint 18.3, I do local Timeshift RSYNCs every time I update the system. I also use Timeshift for both system and data RSYNC backups to an external HDD at least once a week, usually a couple of times. And about once a month I back up only my data to a second HDD. It's not a perfect backup strategy, but it's reasonably tight given my level of activity

[automorphism]

I'd just go with NTFS. The FAT filesystem is annoying. It supports case-sensitive labels, but the filenames are case insensitive as identifiers, which mean you can still use upper and lower case in naming but if you want to rename a file by changing a lower to an upper case letter, that won't work. The FAT filesystem would only be a good idea if you really need out of the box support on OS X. NTFS has better error recovery because even the NTFS-3G has partial journaling support.