On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:54:25 +0000 (UTC), Tony Stanford
I'm buying a laptop with Windowsxp which I intend to network (802.11)
with my desktop. It will be a peer to peer network, ie, I will be
accessing files and printers from each machine, in each direction.
Cabled network, or WiFi?
If WiFi, consider "your" network as potentially unbounded, no matter
how good your Internet barriers (e.g. NAT router) may be.
That would push you towards NTFS, as part of an attempt to say "you
have to successfully pretend to be the System Administrator before
you're allowed to do that". That cuts down attacks to those malware
and attackers who successfullt pretend to be System Administrator.
If OTOH you have a NAT router to hide your network from the Internet,
and the need for a physical cable connection to be on the LAN, then
you have less need to rely on password band-aids.
If I have the XP machine formatted NTFS, will I be able to read files on
it from and to the Win98 machine? Or must I have the XP machine
formatted FAT32 as well to enable file transfer?
When you access computer A's files from computer B, as is the case via
Internet or network, only computer A has to understand computer A's
file system. So you'd only be forced to stay FATxx if you wanted to
actually run Win98 (or its DOS mode) on that PC, and that's not
possible (safe) if the hard drive is > 137G in size.
See
http://cquirke.mvps.org/ntfs.htm
Most folks will say things like "use NTFS it's more secure" or "use
NTFS it's more robust". One could just as easily say "avoid NTFS
because there's hardly any low-level data recovery tools".
So: If you share the PC with people you don't trust, or you open up
your network via WiFi, or you'd rather lose your data than let someone
else see it - then NTFS is for you. NTFS is also your only choice if
you work with files over 2G or 4G in size, e.g. mastering DVDs
OTOH, if you don't have such good backups that you don't care what
happens to what is on your hard drive, then you're better off on
FATxx. If you want to run Winx or DOS mode on the same PC, then FATxx
is your only choice for that.
Then again, you can use both, setting up different volumes for each.
On robustness and data recovery: If you make the whole HD one big C:,
then FAT32 may be more likely to get corrupted than NTFS. But bad
RAM, bad hard drive, or deliberate malware attack will damage or
destroy either file system with equal ease.
If you *do* have file system corruption, your NTFS management tools
are as useless as hitting a broken clock with a hammer in the hope
that the right parts will fall into the right places.
You might have to have a clock-maker's skills to recover data from
FAT32 (as opposed to proprietary intra-chip skills to do the same for
NTFS), but at least the tools are there so you (or whoever you hire)
can apply that know-how to good effect.
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