[Rant] Paragon ExtFS Killed My Data

[blueskull]

I wan doing some maintenance work on my Linux box. I purged the OS, but I didn't get to finish the work while I was busy doing something else of higher priority.

Yesterday, I was in need of some of its data, so I attached some of the hard drives of my Linux box to my Windows PC and I downloaded Paragon ExtFS.

I was able to mount and copy the data out, and I was happy, until I decided to move some of my archive data from my PC to the hard drive.

ExtFS was happy to handle the copy, and I got ~55MB/s, which is making sense considering I was using some cheap high density mechanical drives in RAID 1.

Well, today I mounted the hard drive again, only to find all my data copied yesterday was gone. Some of them was cut and pasted, and my main SSD has TRIM. That means fuck me.

Fortunately, all data loss was videos ripped from DVD and BD, and I can just grab the disks and rip them again, and wait for another 10 hours to transcode everything. So it's not a huge loss.

Still, why this ExtFS didn't work?

[Ampera]

I presume this is a program to mount ext2/3/4 partitions, and I've personally found great success (as in, I had two ext4 partitions on my Windows machines, and it was stable enough to work perfectly for over a year, with the only think not working right being the journal, and the only thing bringing it down was the program crashing after I switched mainboards) in ext2fsd, which has full ext2/3/4 support, and is very minimal.

I'd suggest that, just due to how well it worked out, but can't really offer much else for the Paragon tool, I've never used it. The /best/ way to mount ext4 partitions is to have some linux machine or VM somewhere, running something very minimal, (archlinux?) and mounting that ext4 partition as an SMB share. It takes a lot of resources, but it's almost impossible to go wrong with it.

[TiN]

backed by a company, which is known and trusted by millions of Mac users

 

There are two kind of people. Those who do backups, and those who don't do backups yet. 

[Ampera]

I often find free software is better than paid software, usually because once it becomes something free that is contributed to and worked on by large groups of experienced and dedicated people, from all different hardware backgrounds, understanding all sorts of different aspects of computing. Of course companies will have their own experienced people too, but in the case of Linux, it has proven to be THE kernel for high performance, high reliability computing across the industry of servers and supercomputing, all done by thousands of experienced programmers.

Anyways, go right ahead and let me know how ext2fsd works, as I quite love it, and would use it if a few issues were buffed out, considering ext4 is arguably nicer than the aging NTFS.

[NiHaoMike]

There are two kind of people. Those who do backups, and those who don't do backups yet. 

Thing is, this time, the only data lost was a backup.