USB Backup to NTFS

Hi,

Fresh install of OMV 3.0.96, nothing installed except for the USB backup plugin. External NTFS drive connected via USB.

When using the USB Backup plugin to copy one of my shares to an NTFS drive I get the message "The synchronisation has completed succesfully".
However when I take the drive and plug it into my windows PC some of the directorys aren't accescible and throw the error "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. Sometimes for other folders windows tells me to take ownership of a folder in order to open it but when I do that they also become unreadable.
When I try to backup to a FAT32 drive, I also get the succesful message but nothing is copied (in the log's there is a mention of not being able to "chown" files).

I searched the forums and google and found some people who advise not to backup to NTFS or FAT32 via RSync due to file system differences. However others (including volker, the creator of the plugin and OMV) say that it shouldn't be a problem and claim to do it regularly. I would like to gather some more advice on this.

Secondly I would like some advice on importing media from an NTFS drive using the plugin, would this be safe to do?

Last question: some people advice using WinSCP as an alternative to directly copy files to an attached NTFS drive on OMV. When I try to do this I get the question to open another shell because direct copying is not supported in the current one. The coppying starts but after a few moments the connection seems to get lost and so does the coppying. Is there a solution for this? (I tried turning off the optimize connection buffer setting of WinSCP).

Thanks a lot for any advice / solutions / opinions you guys are willing to give me. I'm at a loss trying to find a reliable way to directly backup my files to an external (prefferably NTFS) drive over USB.

Okay, I guess it is safest to just use "Linux filesystems" (if that's even a correct term) when writing from OMV.

What confuses me are the different opinions everybody seems to have about this. Some say it shouldn't be a problem, others even go so far as saying they backup to NTFS or FAT32 all the time. Even the main developer of OMV volker stated in the comments on the release of the USB backup plugin that FAT filesystems were working for him and didn't oppose using them.
Most linux distro's are also able to at least read NTFS without a lot of problems (at least in my experience) and if I understand correctly OMV is "just" Debian with a web interface (and a lot of stuff to make my life easier while setting up file sharing services).
Does this mean that reading from NTFS is not a problem in OMV?

Not trying to criticise anyone, I greatly appreciate all the work that goes into this project and the support given in this forum. Just trying to get a better understanding of the how and why's

Hi all, thanks for the advice and clarifications!

I read and experimented some more and noticed that copying (or RSync'ing) to NTFS gives good results when I turn off all the options to preserve file privileges and other "linux-specific" stuff. I also noticed that OMV comes with NTFS-3g installed wich means it should have support for writing to NTFS drives.

That being said, I do think it is best not to take any chances concerning backup's. Therefore I will make my backups over samba using a windows PC. Especially since my read/write speed over samba (+100MB/s) seems to almost match the speeds I can obtain with the USB3 drives available to me so there isn't a lot of time that can be saved connecting them directly to the server.

Thanks again for the help!

@cabrio_leo I've also come across the Ext4 drivers (Ext2Fsd,...) for windows while browsing the web. Apperantly, popular opinion seems to be that these aren't very reliable and it is "less dangerous" using NTFS under linug (via NTFS-3g) than the other way around.

I guess I'll switch to ext4 formatted disks when file permissions begin to matter to me and use a linux live usb or setup dual boot on a spare laptop to check the backups.
Thanks for the information.