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I am using Debian 8.8 and am using ntfs-3g to mount an NTFS partition in /etc/fstab. Here is my entry:

/dev/sdc1  /mnt/data_backup  ntfs-3g  rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0002,fmask=0003  0  0

It is fine for my account userA to read and write the partition. However, my workstation is open to another userB which is not in the root group. Is there any way to make the partition writable for the non-root userB? And the best result will be that userB can only append but cannot remove the files in the partition. An FTP solution is also acceptable. Thanks!

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  • is that means userB has no permission to access /mnt/data_backup, what if you add this 'permission'? and modify option uid, gid should be a good idea.
    – Se ven
    Jul 10, 2017 at 4:51

2 Answers 2

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I spent some time learning the concept of users and groups, which help me to understand the mechanism of ntfs-3g module. Here is my solution:

  1. Create a group ntfs, and add the userA and userB to the group.
  2. Modify gid in /etc/fstab to gid=ntfs. Then the mask means all users in the group can write the partition.

@Seven Thanks!

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  • just use the NTFS3 kernel driver and mount with the acl option to enable POSIX permissions
    – phuclv
    Jul 9 at 4:13
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Asked 4 years, 10 months ago

currently 2022-05-11

I use RHEL/CentOS 7.9, and using ntfs-3g-2021.8.22-2.el7.x86_64.rpm and ntfs-3g-libs-2021.8.22-2.el7.x86_64.rpm which I believe come from the EPEL repository, I have no problems with mounting an ntfs partition as writable. In fact using this latest ntfs-3g I do not even have to use the -t ntfs-3g option for the mount command. My ntfs file systems however do have rwxrwxrwx for everything on them when being mounted in linux.

Back when I was using ntfs-3g, like 2019 version, it did work but I had to use the -t ntfs-3g option when mounting, among other nuances.

So the current answer to this question, based on my experience and I use a usb portable disk formatted as ntfs under windows 10 to transfer data between my windows pc to linux servers... all the time for the last couple years... I have no problems mounting an ntfs partition in linux, and being able to write to it regardless of the linux user. So use the latest ntfs-3g version.

But if you want to ntfs-3g mount an ntfs partition and have a reasonable user/group permission policy that is a different story.

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  • the NTFS kernel driver has been available since 2021. There's no reason to use the much worse NTFS-3g FUSE driver
    – phuclv
    Jul 9 at 4:12
  • what are you implying? As of now with RHEL 8.8 if you do not manually install ntfs-3g and ntfs-3g-libs which show as version 2022.10.3-1 you cannot mount NTFS. What other way is there to do this? whether it's a kernel driver or a FUSE driver whatever that means... which as a user as long as it works reliably I don't care which it is; I've never had a problem doing what i've been doing and i'm not aware of any other way
    – ron
    Jul 10 at 15:05

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