So recently tried zorin os and now im dual booting it with windows, and because of that I need a have NTFS partition between them. Now I have a 256gb windows partition, a 256 linux partition and a 1.7 Tb shared ntfs partition shared between them and I wonder how do you organize your files if you need to have them on another partition and cant use ~.
For programs they will always end up on / and I cant install them on another partition (dont know why) but what do you do for files? What folders do you have and where are they?
I also use an NTFS partion for shared data, even though I haven’t booted into Windows for a year or something. To me the best solution is currently to auto-mount the whole NTFS partion to something like /mnt/data using the /etc/fstab file. I additionally use bind mounts to show all the content e.g. of the shared documents folder /mnt/data/documents in a specific folder in my home directory like ~/Documents/shared
Using btrfs with subvolumes to mount different disks in different locations. To maintain an “OS” disk and “what really matters” disk.
When I did dual-boot, I almost always used a dedicated partition or drive for shared media. Back then, it was usually formatted as FAT32, but sometimes NTFS. These days, I’d probably make it exFAT, since it supports large files without the hassle of permissions, and is itself supported by both Windows and Linux.
As for organizing things, I treated the drive as if it were a file server (which is what I use now). The general hierarchy looks like this:
Backups Books Documents Downloads Games Images Music Notes Photos Software Videos WebdevYou can just mount it in a folder in your home directory. This is not a weird thing to do.
I too had an NTFS partition at first. Definitely not great, since it trashes your file permissions. I was glad to be rid of it when I binned the other OS.
Woud that be /home/username/SATA (SATA is my ntfs partition) or /home/username (where user will be deleted and will be replaced with my partition)?
In this case definitely the first. Just make a new directory (name doesn’t matter: SATA, Files, data…) and use your distro’s tool to change the mount point (Disks on GNOME and derivatives, or just edit fstab yourself)
I was juggling like that, I had most of my files in NTFS so I could read them in windows, even for files read only by Linux programs.
Most programs were able to read from any part of the file system, but for those with strict paths I used symlinks.But I haven’t had any use for Windows lately so I decided to delete all but one NTFS partition and this last one is only 256GB with 100GB free.
The rest of the data I moved it to ext4 and btrf partitions.