Ubuntu - moving home directories to NTFS drive

I have a disk formatted as NTFS that I current use for sharing data with Windows machines via Samba. All of the data is in a directory on that disk called "shared." I want to move my current home directories to a directory on that disk called "home." The drive is mounted automatically at the location "/media/data."

I have a couple questions concerning this move.

1) How to I make sure Ubuntu is aware of the change?

2) I realize there will likely be permission-related issues with this move. I'm not familiar with permissions in NTFS (or really with NTFS on a technical scale at all), but would it be enough just to chown/chgrp/chmod everything back to what they were before the move, or is there a more formal way of doing this?

Edit: I realize I may not have made it clear what it is I'm doing that requires my disk to be NTFS and why I'm putting my home directories on it. The "shared" directory is mostly used by Windows machines and houses quite a few large files (larger than 4GB, which is why FAT32 isn't an option). I'm wanting to move all of the data off of the disk that has the Ubuntu OS on it and put it on the NTFS disk in question, which includes home directories.

Edit 2: Instead of moving the home directories, I'll just be storing data on the NTFS drive and symlinking them as necessary, as suggested in the comments under the answer marked correct.

dawsonc623

Posted 2013-01-21T01:30:15.970

Reputation: 133

Answers

It is no good idea to use NTFS as linux home partition. There are several sensitive files like private keys and I am not sure if Ubuntu / the ntfs driver is using all of the permission capabilities of NTFS (it is different from ext3 or ext4).

What is the problem with a samba share? Maybe rsync is an alternative if you want to share /sync to an NTFS drive?

Jens Peters

Posted 2013-01-21T01:30:15.970

Reputation: 116

The reason for NTFS is I need something that both Windows can understand and that will allow for files larger than 4GB. Also, there's nothing wrong with Samba, I just want the home directories to be on the other drive. – None – 2013-01-21T01:39:18.390

1I would suggest to put the files you need in windows e.g. videos on a nfts device. Then symlink them to your ubuntu home. So the security issues are not relevant, also i guess you do not need linux specific config files in windows..? – None – 2013-01-21T01:44:55.003

Nope. In the eyes of Windows, this disk is more or less a hunk of space to throw files into. I want the Ubuntu OS to use it for all of it's data storage as well (which includes the home directories) and just keep the OS and application files on the disk with the OS image. I hope I'm making myself clear. – None – 2013-01-21T01:51:50.847