Our personal laptops run Pop OS, but my wife has a work laptop that runs Windows. We bought a portable external disk and I would like advice on the best filesystem that will allow us to plug it into Windows and Linux, back and forth. The most obvious candidates are:
- NTFS
- Ext4
- Btrfs
Yes, she is allowed to install drivers. She already has the Ext4 drivers; it's actually a work requirement. My main thoughts are:
- Ext4 and Btrfs would preserve Unix permissions while NTFS would not. I'm not sure if this is an issue with NTFS, but with FAT every dammed file ends up being "executable" when you copy it to Linux, for example.
- On the other hand, I'm not sure how Windows would handle Ext4 and Btrfs, or how reliable the drivers are. Yesterday we tried reading an old external disk (Ext4) and she couldn't mount it at all. She could see the device, but nothing about files and no useful error message. We mounted it on Linux and it worked flawlessly.
So if anyone has experience sharing files between Windows and Linux and can suggest to me what's likely to work and what's going to give me headaches, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
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