Hi, I’ve been running a Ubuntu on Mac Mini homelab for past couple of weeks (Jellyfin, Transmission, SMB), and I keep hitting NTFS issues - some of which were my own fault, but I’m now seeking advice for the future.

  1. I wanted to unmount the drive. Drive was busy (seems it is as long as smbd is running). So I do umount -f, expecting it will kill the process and unmount similar to Unlocker app - it corrupted the entire drive. Didn’t work on Windows or Linux, vcn error… After a few days of painful recovery, I set it all back up…

  2. Went to mv a file to a subfolder, got impatient, cancelled it. Tried to remove the partial file - IO error! Couldn’t remove it, not after reboot, not as root, no way. And I couldn’t access the entire folder because of that one file.

To fix, I had to plug in the drive to the Windows machine, saw the file for a sec, then file disappeared itself (some self-repair system?)

  1. sometimes the drive doesn’t appear at all, takes a few repluggings to get it working? On Windows machine it works okay.

Is there any other FS you could recommend? (needs to be Windows compatible as well)

Thank you.

  • EtherMan@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    You’re using experimental drivers and force unmounting… And you actually have the gall to then try to pin the blame for errors from that on ntfs? Just no.

    ntfs does have many issues which is why ms is developing refs to replace it. But stability or corruption isn’t one of those issues. Ntfs is extremely solid in that regard due to the journaling.

    Ntfs drivers in linux are however very buggy and generally considered experimental and that you should not write to ntfs drives if there’s any data you care about as it could easily destroy all data there.

    If you need a common writable data area then use exfat, not ntfs.