Just got myself a new computer and thinking of how set it up.
I have win7 HP and will probably install at least some version of Ubuntu on it shortly to have dual boot. Might come other Linux distros too in the future.
I have a 1TB HDD and my question is what’s the smartest way to share files on all OS’s? In what format?
I was thinking of ~100GB for Windows for apps and games etc. ~20-50GB for Ubuntu and some third partition, where I store my common files like media, pics, docs, downloads and stuff, taking the rest of the free space.
What filesystem should the shared partition be?
Is there some smart way to get windows home directories and linux home directories to point to the same place on the shared partition or would it be recommended to just keep them separated?
Solution:
Easiest thing – A nas network share that will just work in both or a USB pen drive!
Apart from that, As Ubuntu can read from NTFS but Windows can’t read from EXT2/4 etc.
In your setup, I would personally have a 50GB partition for Ubuntu and then you have a choice:
The rest for Windows and simply access the NTFS partition from Ubuntu (which should work) or creating a new drive of a few GBs, format with NTFS or Fat32, and use for sharing files.
I personally wouldn’t share home directories cross operating systems, it may work – but in my books, it is asking for trouble later on.