Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft's NTFS
filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert
does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at
image/ntfs.img
, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete
this to free up space.
Although I believe this tool to be stable, please note that I take no responsibility if something goes awry!
You're probably also interested in WinBtrfs, which is a Btrfs filesystem driver for Windows.
Thanks to Eric Biggers, who successfully reverse-engineered Windows 10's "WOF compressed data", and whose code I've used here.
On Windows, from an Administrator command prompt:
ntfs2btrfs.exe D:\
Bear in mind that it won't work with your boot drive or a drive containing a pagefile that's currently in use.
On Linux, as root:
ntfs2btrfs /dev/sda1
On Windows, go to the Releases page and download the latest Zip file, or use Scoop.
For Linux:
- Arch
- Fedora (thanks to Conan-Kudo)
- Gentoo ebuild
- Debian (thanks to alexmyczko)
- Ubuntu (thanks to alexmyczko)
- openSUSE (thanks to David Sterba)
For other distributions or operating systems, you will need to compile it yourself - see below.
-
20220812
- Added --no-datasum option, to skip calculating checksums
- LXSS / WSL metadata is now preserved
- Fixed lowercase drive letters not being recognized
- Fixed crash due to iterator invalidation (thanks to nyanpasu64)
- Fixed corruption when NTFS places file in last megabyte of disk
-
20210923
- Added (Btrfs) compression support (zlib, lzo, and zstd)
- Added support for other hash algorithms: xxhash, sha256, and blake2
- Added support for rolling back to NTFS
- Added support for NT4-style security descriptors
- Increased conversion speed for volume with many inodes
- Fixed bug when fragmented file was in superblock location
- Fixed buffer overflow when reading security descriptors
- Fixed bug where filesystems would be corrupted in a way that
btrfs check
doesn't pick up
-
20210523
- Improved handling of large compressed files
-
20210402 (source code only release)
- Fixes for compilation on non-amd64 architectures
-
20210105
- Added support for NTFS compression
- Added support for "WOF compressed data"
- Fixed problems caused by sparse files
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
-
20201108
- Improved error handling
- Added better message if NTFS is corrupted or unclean
- Better handling of relocations
-
20200330
- Initial release
On Windows, open the source directory in a recent version of MSVC, right-click on CMakeLists.txt, and click Compile.
On Linux:
cmake .
make
You'll also need libfmt installed - it should be in your package manager.
Compression support requires zlib, lzo, and/or zstd - again, they will be in your package manager. See also the cmake options WITH_ZLIB, WITH_LZO, and WITH_ZSTD, if you want to disable this.
- Files
- Directories
- Symlinks
- Other reparse points
- Security descriptors
- Alternate data streams
- DOS attributes (hidden, system, etc.)
- Rollback to original NTFS image
- Preservation of LXSS metadata
- Windows' old extended attributes (you're not using these)
- Large (i.e >16KB) ADSes (you're not using these either)
- Preservation of the case-sensitivity flag
- Unusual cluster sizes (i.e. not 4 KB)
- Encrypted files
Yes, if the stars are right. See Quibble.