OpenMediaVault FAQ #12

In this forum I read in the OpenMediaVault FAQ article by WastlJ:

<<<
12. What filesystem should I use on my data drive(s)?

PLEASE format your data drives with EXT3/EXT4. With other filesystems
like NTFS you´ll run into problems as soon as you create your first
folder because of the privileges!
>>>

Can anybody please elaborate, how and under which circumstances the privelege problems occure?

To try out, I attached some external NTFS formatted USB drives (most contents were already there) to my HP microserver with OVM 2.2.25. I accessed the drives, created directories, copied files inside, edited the files and deleted them. No problem so far. Not many tests either.

For all internal drives, I am using ext4, but for the external drive, NTFS is convenient at the moment because of hopefully easy usage together with Windows type OS. I just like to understand the concrete nature of the problems, to be able to better plan, how to set things up.

[BTW., using ext4 was not without problems. Using a disk formated to ext4 by gparted-live-cd yields in confusing error messages ("special file missing" or similar). In dmesg, I then found the real reason was, that gparted obviously used some newer ext4 features (#400), which are not supported on OMV 2.2.25 an which will make mounting the disk fail. Formatting the disk with OMV allowed mounting again. Seems to show, that ext4 is not that universally usable as i.e. ext3.]

Ryecoaaron, from your answer, I unfortunately still not understand, under which concrete circumstances the privelege problems occure. You mention ACL. Does it mean, it will fail, when I need ACL from Windows clients? When I need Unix type ACLs? Am I safe, when I have no desire to use ACL or is some implict ACL usage already a problem.

To your question - desire to use NTFS. I guess, the question and my answer could make a good starting point to some emotional discussion about pros and cons of different scenarios, which I'd rather avoid.
Actually, I have no intrinsic desire to use NTFS. But still two main reasons: - a couple of TB of data are already there on NTFS, so it would be convenient, to let it there. - Moving data to some other place (which is not controlled by myself, not in "my" network - experience shows, that an external NTFS drive is typically easy to access at many places - not as easy as FAT32, however). BTW - I am only talking about external USB drives. Typically, they were attached to some Windows (or multi OS) computers, but now, I want them to attach to the file server. I am also well aware of many methods to access different Unixish file systems on Windows type OSes.