NTFS

From Wikipedia:

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family.

The ntfs3 kernel driver provides read and write support for the file system.

There are no userspace utilities alongside the kernel driver. To format partitions or perform maintenance you still need a Windows machine or external tools like NTFS-3G.

Tips and tricks

Improving performance

You can enable the prealloc mount(8) option to decrease fragmentation in case of parallel write operations (most useful for HDD).

Prevent creation of names not allowed by Windows

NTFS itself does not have restrictions for characters and names used, but Windows does.

ntfs3 supports windows_names mount(8) option. Use it to strictly maintain compatibility.

Tip: udisks has this option enabled by default.

Known issues

Explicit file system type required to mount

ntfs3 requires the file system type to mount.

To be able to mount the file system, specify its type as ntfs3. For example, using mount(8)'s -t/--types option:

# mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt

Or using fstab:

/etc/fstab

/dev/sdxY /mnt ntfs3 defaults 0 0

Troubleshooting

File system mounts read-only

The kernel from linux package has enabled CONFIG_NTFS_FS compatibility option [1]. It mimics the legacy driver behavior and mounts the file system read-only when ntfs type is used for mount.

To mount the file system read-write, use ntfs3 type. See #Explicit file system type required to mount.

unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'

When mounting NTFS, you can encounter an error such as:

mount: /mnt: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'

See #Explicit file system type required to mount.

If you want to use ntfs3 as the default driver for ntfs partitions, such udev rule does the trick:

/etc/udev/rules.d/ntfs3_by_default.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="block", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}=="ntfs", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}="ntfs3"

Although, this method is not recommended and can confuse some 3rd party tools.

Unable to mount with ntfs3 with partition marked dirty

When trying to mount a good NTFS partition (i.e. which successfully mounts with NTFS-3G and for which ntfsfix --no-action does not report any error), you may get the following error:

mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
       dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

ntfs3 will not mount a partition where the volume is marked dirty without the force option. dmesg explicitly helps recognizing the situation, saying:

sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

You can try passing the --clear-dirty argument to ntfsfix(8) to clean it. [2]