Linux and NTFS: peace at last?

Ever since Samba came along, it's never been too much trouble getting information from Windows machines to Linux systems.

You just mounted the Windows file system with SMB (server message block) as a network drive, and you could read and write to the Windows NTFS (New Technology File System) disk volumes as easily as you could to the older FAT (File Allocation Table) systems.

Of course, this presumed that the files you wanted to get your hands on were on a network drive. If they were hidden away on an NTFS local drive or PC drive that wasn't part of an NT-style domain or AD (Active Directory) forest, things then got more tricky.

Usually a lot more tricky.

Reading from NTFS file systems wasn't too much trouble. Writing to a file or creating a new file, though, was something else again. And, trying to adjust the size of an NTFS partition or recover a dead file was, while not impossible, hard enough that few people wanted to try it.

Now, however, Paragon Software Group has created its own NTFS driver: NTFS for Linux. And, from what my friends over at PC Magazine Labs can tell, it works pretty darn well.

Yet, it's a tool that only the tech-savvy should touch. For starters, it seems to do a mighty fine job of getting around NTFS's security.