Is it safe to use an NTFS volume (partition) for Linux `/home` mountpoint?

Question

I have an old computer with decent performance but small storage (one 320GB HDD). I created 4 partitions on it. One for boot, one for Windows 10 system, one (ext4) for Ubuntu, the last (NTFS) for data storage.

I've already moved all User Shell Folders in Windows to the data partition with registry tweaks, and I am currently having only one mountpoint (root, /) for Ubuntu. As I process a lot of data across two systems, I store a lot. However I don't want to store too much in Ubuntu's system drive, so I grabbed ntfs-3g and now I'm planning to mount the data drive directly over /home (so I can share data easily).

What I am planning to do is adding this to fstab

/dev/sda4 /home rw,noatime,nosuid,nodev,exec,umask=000 0 0

I'm wondering if it's safe to do so before I go for it.

Answer 1

Altough generally it is supported with ntfs-3g you have to keep in mind a few things :

• permissions - both Linux and Windows have different rules about permissions and one might not apply exactly to the other, you could have a lot of permission problems when changing from one system to the other

• speed - ntfs-3g is not quite performance-oriented and it will work slower on the Linux machine than on Windows

I would suggest to use a subfolder to share some data between the operating systems, or use another filesystem like fat32 or better yet - exFat, that should resolve most of the issues, but still I would not exactly recommend storing the whole /home partition on a mount shared with Windows, and only use a sub-selection of the needed directories.