Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@mcc @jmhill @Foritus While SSDs can lose data when unpowered, that’s more of a boogeyman than a real problem. It’s like cell wear. Problems can be induced under extreme conditions. As long as you stick to the brands which make their own flash, SSDs practically never die from wear, and they almost never lose data even going without power for years.

[mega@chaos.social]

@mcc ntfs-3g Is pretty good. I've even used some of their additional tooling to rescue data from a dead disk (had lots of dead blocks)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @Foritus Okay.

Assuming I understand these things in principle but not in detail and am looking for actual help— used to, when I used macs, I could create a "Sparse Bundle Disk Image" and it was like a hard drive in a file, which could grow and and shrink returning space to the host disk as it shrank, and could be encrypted, and could be compressed. Is this a thing I can do from Linux? What's the best way? (Assume for this one question I no longer care about Windows.)

[elladan@kind.social]

@nabijaczleweli @mcc there are two NTFS implementations, ntfs-3g and ntfs-plus. Plus is faster and considered more modern, but iirc at least one Linux distro still prefers 3g because they consider plus buggy.

Regardless, my understanding is that neither of them actually support basic features like the journal, so I wouldn't trust them for anything important personally. That said they might not be worse than exfat, just very very complicated in comparison.

[qoqo941305@mastodon.social]

@mcc I don’t know what any of this means but I’m scared for you

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@qoqo941305 Computer is scary sometimes

[maaneeack@noc.social]

@mcc I used ntfs drives on linux for a while after switching but I've converted them both to btrfs. I had no issues with them being ntfs, but there had been an issue with corruption when using them in linux & windows, that might already be fixed though

[foxdodge@yiff.life]

@mcc fwiw, my drives are NTFS-formatted and I've had no issues accessing my files from any of my drives between windows and a few different linux distros.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc @rotopenguin @Foritus so like... a folder?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@aeva @rotopenguin @Foritus A folder has several limitations by comparison. It cannot be compressed, it cannot be encrypted with a different key from the drive which contains it, it cannot be mounted read-only, and it cannot be unmounted.

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@mcc @Foritus I don't know of any Linux thing that will automatically grow like a sparse bundle, or take kindly to shrinking at all.

[catriona@tech.lgbt]

@mcc I've had some issues with NTFS, mostly if my computer crashes, I need to boot into Windows and do chkdsk /f on them to repair them. Other than that it works mostly fine.

Steam on Linux does not seem to like NTFS (I've had a couple of games work on NTFS but loads more not) but if it's just for archival I guess that won't be an issue?

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@mcc @rotopenguin @Foritus I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Mac OS sparse bundle shrink.

A ZFS bitstream file works roughly that way, though it’s not carved up into smaller, FAT32-friendly chunks. You get one using ‘zfs send’, and you should be able to mount it directly. I don’t personally use btrfs, but I would expect it to have similar capabilities.

Shrinking such a file when data is removed would involve another ‘zfs send’ operation to a new file on the disk, so you would need at least the size of the file in free space.