ntfs-3g

INTRODUCTION

The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, NetBSD, OpenIndiana, QNX and Haiku. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 NTFS file systems.

The purpose of the project is to develop, quality assurance and support a trustable, featureful and high performance solution for hardware platforms and operating systems whose users need to reliably interoperate with NTFS. Besides this practical goal, the project also aims to explore the limits of the hybrid, kernel/user space filesystem driver approach, performance, reliability and feature richness per invested effort wise.

Besides the common file system features, NTFS-3G has support for file ownership and permissions, POSIX ACLs, junction points, extended attributes and creating internally compressed files (parameter files in the directory .NTFS-3G may be required to enable them). The new compressed file formats available in Windows 10 can also be read through a plugin.

News, support answers, problem submission instructions, support and discussion forums, and other information are available on the project web site at

https://github.com/tuxera/ntfs-3g/wiki

The project has been funded, supported and maintained since 2008 by Tuxera:

https://tuxera.com

LICENSES

All the NTFS related components: the file system drivers, the ntfsprogs utilities and the shared library libntfs-3g are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the included file COPYING.

The fuse-lite library is distributed under the terms of the GNU LGPLv2. See the included file COPYING.LIB.

QUICK INSTALLATION

Most distributions have an up-to-date NTFS-3G package ready for use, and the recommended way is to install it.

If you need some specific customization, you can compile and install from the released source code. Make sure you have the basic development tools and the kernel includes the FUSE kernel module. Then unpack the source tarball and type:

./configure
make
make install      # or 'sudo make install' if you aren't root.

Please note that NTFS-3G doesn't require the FUSE user space package any more.

The list of options for building specific configurations is displayed by typing :

./configure --help

Below are a few specific options to ./configure : --disable-ntfsprogs : do not build the ntfsprogs tools, --enable-extras : build more ntfsprogs tools, --disable-plugins : disable support for plugins --enable-posix-acls : enable support for Posix ACLs --enable-xattr-mappings : enable system extended attributes mappings --with-fuse=external : use external fuse (overriding Linux default)

There are also a few make targets for building parts : make libntfs : only build the libntfs-3g library make libs : only build libntfs-3g (and libfuse-lite, if relevant) make drivers : only build drivers and libraries, without ntfsprogs make ntfsprogs : only build ntfsprogs and libntfs-3g, without drivers

USAGE

If there was no error during installation then the NTFS volume can be read-write mounted for everybody the following way as the root user (unmount the volume if it was already mounted, and replace /dev/sda1 and /mnt/windows, if needed):

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

or ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

Please see the ntfs-3g manual page for more options and examples.

You can also make NTFS to be mounted during boot by putting the below line at the END(!) of the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

TESTING WITHOUT INSTALLING

Newer versions of ntfs-3g can be tested without installing anything and without disturbing an existing installation. Just configure and make as shown previously. This will create the scripts ntfs-3g and lowntfs-3g in the src directory, which you may activate for testing:

./configure
make

then, as root: src/ntfs-3g [-o mount-options] /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

And, to end the test, unmount the usual way: umount /dev/sda1

NTFS UTILITIES

The ntfsprogs directory includes utilities for doing all required tasks to NTFS partitions. In general, just run a utility without any command line options to display the version number and usage syntax.

The following utilities are so far implemented:

ntfsfix - Attempt to fix an NTFS partition and force Windows to check NTFS.

mkntfs - Format a partition with the NTFS filesystem. See man 8 mkntfs for command line options.

ntfslabel - Display/change the label of an NTFS partition. See man 8 ntfslabel for details.

ntfsundelete - Recover deleted files from an NTFS volume. See man 8 ntfsundelete for more details.

ntfsresize - Resize NTFS volumes. See man 8 ntfsresize for details.

ntfsclone - Efficiently create/restore an image of an NTFS partition. See man 8 ntfsclone for details.

ntfscluster - Locate the owner of any given sector or cluster on an NTFS partition. See man 8 ntfscluster for details.

ntfsinfo - Show some information about an NTFS partition or one of the files or directories within it. See man 8 ntfsinfo for details.

ntfsrecover - Recover updates committed by Windows but interrupted before being synced.

ntfsls - List information about files in a directory residing on an NTFS partition. See man 8 ntfsls for details.

ntfscat - Concatenate files and print their contents on the standard output.

ntfscp - Overwrite files on an NTFS partition.

ntfssecaudit - Audit the security metadata.

ntfsusermap - Assistance for building a user mapping file.