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Win 10 home theater PC file system (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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Is it ok to swap over to Linux as long as the boot drive is reformatted as Ext4 but my storage drives are NTFS?

I have a Win 10 home theater pc that I use for plex and gaming. I want to swap over to Linux but my drives are formatted in NTFS. I have heard that while Linux can read and write NTFS, there is a possibility of corruption. I have a separate OS drive that I can reformat.

I really don’t have the spare cash right now to buy another HDD to pull over files before reformatting my current drives.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

The biggest issue that I ran into when I was using NTFS drives with Linux was caused by unclean drive dismounts. After power outages, forced shutdowns, or manually pulled drives (I am the problem sometimes), the NTFS drive would sometimes fail to mount properly unless I connected it to a Windows computer and scanned the drive for errors first. Not the end of the world if you have backups and a Windows computer handy, but pretty terrible if you don't have both.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hmm ya, that’s definitely a concern in my location. Power goes out several times a year here, even if it’s just momentarily long enough to power off the PC. I should have a UPS but never had the spare cash to throw at that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    To be fair, power loss is a concern for any setup. More recent copy-on-write filesystems are supposed to be a bit more resilient...but I also worry about the lack of a long-term reliability track record for newer filesystems like BTRFS. The long term solution, like more than one other poster has indicated, is having multiple backups.

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