Hi everyone! I have been happily using Syncthing for the past year in all of my devices, including Android phones, tablets, Windows and Linux installations.
After playing around with Fedora 43 KDE I decided to ditch Windows 11 as my main OS in my personal computer. Nevertheless, I still need Windows to easily interact with the public administration in my country, so I thought of using dualboot in my 2tb drive and create a shared exFat partition between the two OS to store my files (Music, movies, personal documents, etc.)
My question is: it is feasible to have Syncthing installed in both operating systems (and syncing files between that operating system and other devices) pointing to the same folders in that shared exFat partition? I want to do something like this because I don’t want to, let’s say, boot on Windows 11 everytime I want my files synced with my phone or tablet
Thanks for the response! After reading the article I think that, since I am going to be using Fedora as my primary OS, I am going to install Syncthing only in this OS and store my folders in a partition in exFat. In that way, if for any reason I need to use Windows, I know that I can retrieve my files from the shared partition in exFat.
I am a noob regarding to Linux, but this kind of set up might work just fine for my use case.
I would be very uncomfortable storing data on exFAT because it only uses a single file allocation table. The ancient FAT format from floppy disks always used two file allocation tables that could be used to recover from disk corruption (although it required the use of chkdsk). I have run into this file system corruption on exFAT in Windows.
I prefer to use a service for Windows to read and write ext3 or ext4 on Windows when I need interoperability between Linux and Windows on the same disk. (I use one from Paragon Software, there are others.)
I recommend using NTFS for shared partitions. The Linux kernel now provides support for that (so there’s no slow FUSE module required). It isn’t the best but probably better than relying on extFAT.
I have this kind of setup for a long time. However, I don’t share the Syncthing config. So Linux and Windows have a distinct Syncthing config and distinct device IDs and show up as different devices on other devices. This works without issue, is simple to setup and one does not need to take care to keep both instances of Syncthing at the same version.
WOW. Didn’t give any thought to the question of filesystems! After careful consideration I’m going to store all my data in Linux, and if i need to access any file from Windows I will use a third party service (like the one from Paragon)