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.

  • kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2hBEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    NTFS seems really sensitive?

    no its not, NTFS ir rock solid, you are just using it incorrectly, use it with Windows as you are supposed to do…

    I have had hundreds if not thousands of NTFS crashes and never lost a single file, but have lost quite a lot with other filesystems.

  • bufandatlBEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Don’t use NTFS either Linux as 24/7 file system. Use Linux natives like ext4, xfs or zfs. And share the drive via samba. If it’s a drive that needs to travel between systems use EXFat.