ntfsprogs vs. fusefs-ntfs (ntfs-3g) reliability?

Jan Henrik Sylvester me at janh.de
Wed Aug 13 09:06:09 UTC 2008


Is there a particular reason our ntfsprogs port did not get updated for 
a year but now it has?

So far I did use ntfs-3g for mounting and ntfsprogs for resizing etc. 
with very few problems. Once on copying many files, two of them were 
only partially written with error messages "Bad address" and "No such 
file or directory". On the second attempt, I was able to copy them. 
(Moreover, using qemu volumes residing on ntfs-3g does not work, but I 
guess that is more of a fuse issue than an ntfs-3g one.)

Today, our ntfsprogs port got updated to 2.0.0. On ntfs-3g.org, it is 
stated that "[they] warn against the usage of ntfsprogs-2.0.0 because of 
major reliability issues (write failure, sparse file corruption, utility 
hang, etc). Use an earlier version instead until they get fixed."

Some google search shows that former ntfsprogs developer(s) are now 
working on ntfs-3g and the authors of both projects have some 
discrepancies: http://forum.linux-ntfs.org/viewtopic.php?t=741 
http://www.nabble.com/Re:-ntfsprogs-2.0.0-released-p12958587.html

All I can tell is that ntfsprogs really has not been updated for a year 
and ntfs-3g seems to be actively developed.

Either the ntfs-3g developer is correct and using ntfsprogs 2.0.0 is 
dangerous, or he is incorrect, which would make using ntfs-3g a little 
dubious.

Do you have any information from a third party? Do you think that both 
FreeBSD ports ntfs-3g and ntfsprogs 2.0.0 are reliable?

Thanks,
Jan Henrik


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