Let me start out by saying I support MacFUSE in their efforts of bringing NTFS to the MacOSX, and am grateful to have their software to help me write NTFS onto my SeaGate 500GB Portable NTFS. Now, with that said and done, I would like to issue a warning to all users of the software. I have used MacFUSE for a great three months now on my personal iMac at school, and installed it on all of the other iMacs in our facility. There is no extra data or applications on our iMacs; the only software other than software updates directly from Apple, and MacFUSE are the only things we have downloaded from the internet. Now, all the iMacs have gone through the correct install and reboot process, and for about a month we had not seen any problems. I am an artist. I work a lot in Photoshop. About two weeks ago, I was doing some transfers to display my portfolio, saving a large .PSD (around 400MB-500MB) to my external drive, and upon finishing the save, I correctly ejected the drive (CMD +Click>Eject). After ejecting the drive successfully, I plugged in the USB to my native Windows laptop, running Windows Vista Ultimate x64/ x86. Its important to note here that I have used Mac and Windows with no difficulty for two months, and it is not the Windows fault. Once the 'Autoplay' menu arose, obviously showing that it recognized the drive, I clicked on "View Files/Folders." To my surprise, two folders that I hadn't touched or saved anything to on the Mac were missing. Both folders, unfortunately, contained all the work I had done from my Summer and Spring Breaks, 3 months of works, and over 20GB of pictures and files. And yes, the folders were in fact on the Mac's display when I was saving the PSDs. On Windows, I looked for them as if they were hidden, and yes, I also searched for hidden files on the iMac. Unfortunately, they had dropped off the face of my eHDD. I was devastated. Luckily, I didn't temper with the drive any longer, and I was able to have someone take an entire week for me and RESTORE (this required professional software) 80-90% of the lost pictures and files. Nonetheless, I still lost about 2GB of data, files most of which were very important. I have read: "The driver currently is in BETA status, which means that no data corruption or loss has been reported during ordinary driver use, nor found in our extensive quality testing before release of the latest version, however we are aware of certain usability issues and driver limitations which are all documented and planned to be resolved in the future. It may be revealing about the high reliability of the NTFS-3G driver that an increasing number of users find hidden hardware faults, and several Microsoft released NTFS bugs during NTFS-3G testing and usage." But this needs to be stated, as it has happened to me. Random files and directories can be lost using MacFUSE, even carefully, and even if they weren't even touched on the device before eject.
I warn that, upon using MacFUSE, that you may loose important data if you: A. Use MacFUSE to make your drive a live file-system B. Update files by overwriting them on your drive using MacFUSE. C. Use both Windows and Mac with MacFUSE. D. Use MacFUSE with any NTFS drive. (which means doing any of the three above and all other approaches using MacFUSE) Although it is a nice and free alternative to pay-for driver/app, I recommend that upon choosing an external hard drive to buy a FAT32 or Mac-Based drive beforehand; otherwise, you can end up loosing a lot of data using a beta freeware. I didn't think it would happen to me. But, like many terminal diseases such as AIDs and Brain Cancer, you never do. I'm not asking for the issue to be attended to, I have recovered as much as I can. But I'm backing up my drive onto another drive and reformatting it to FAT32 so I can use it now, because I'm certainly not looking forward to loosing any more important files. You may want to look into this, MacFUSE devs--random data deletion-- maybe try to fix it. When you get a stable version up, or maybe Apple finally buys into NTFS support, I'll delete the partition and go back to NTFS. For now, farewell MacFUSE. -Jake B. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacFUSE" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
