In-place conversion of NTFS? You either still believe in a god or need to google the price of harddrives these days. Honest question tho, why would anybody do in-place conversion of partitions?
>You either still believe in a god or need to google the price of harddrives these days.
That was pretty funny, and I agree a thousand times over. When I was younger (read: had shallower pockets) I was willing to spend time on these hacks to avoid the need for intermediate storage. Now that I'm wiser, crankier, and surrounded by cheap storage: I would rather just have Bezos send me a pair of drives in <24h to chuck in a sled. They can populate while I'm occupied and/or sleeping.
My time spent troubleshooting this crap when it inevitably explodes is just not worth the price of a couple of drives; and if I still manage to cock everything up at least the latter approach leaves me with one or more backup copies. If everything goes according to plan well hey the usable storage on my NAS just went up ;-). I feel bad for the people that will inevitably run this command on the only copy of their data. (Though I would hope the userland tool ships w/ plenty of warnings to the contrary.)
Maybe if your NTFS drive is less than half full, at least I assume this is a limitation of this project since it mentions keeping an original copy... Still, belief in god seems about right, or you have good backups. I had about 2.5 TB on a 3 TB NTFS drive I decided to move over to ZFS, just rsynced to a few various drives since I didn't have that much contiguous space elsewhere (building a NAS later...), learned I had a file whose name is too long for either ZFS or ext4 and had to rename it, and after making a zpool out of the drive I just rsynced everything back. Doing it in place would have saved hours.. but only hours, on something not high urgency that doesn't require babysitting.
The backup is a reflink copy as per readme - that means data blocks are shared with live filesystem and don't occupy extra space but there's probably quite a bit of metadata.
Just because something is cheap doesn't mean I'm fine with buying it for a one-shot use.
Buying an extra disk for just the conversion is wasteful, and then you need space to keep it stashed forever when you never use it. Not at all sustainable, I'd rather leave the hardware on the market for people who _actually_ need it.
So you buy an external 1TB drive just for the sake of the conversion, then create a new partition, then copy your 1TB of data over, then... what? Wipe your PC, boot into a live CD, then copy the partition over? Do you find this easier/more worthwhile than an in-place conversion? How/why?
That was pretty funny, and I agree a thousand times over. When I was younger (read: had shallower pockets) I was willing to spend time on these hacks to avoid the need for intermediate storage. Now that I'm wiser, crankier, and surrounded by cheap storage: I would rather just have Bezos send me a pair of drives in <24h to chuck in a sled. They can populate while I'm occupied and/or sleeping.
My time spent troubleshooting this crap when it inevitably explodes is just not worth the price of a couple of drives; and if I still manage to cock everything up at least the latter approach leaves me with one or more backup copies. If everything goes according to plan well hey the usable storage on my NAS just went up ;-). I feel bad for the people that will inevitably run this command on the only copy of their data. (Though I would hope the userland tool ships w/ plenty of warnings to the contrary.)