Monday, December 13, 2010

Adding NTFS Write Functionality to OSX

Okay the story is like this: I have Windows, Ubuntu and MacOSX systems in my home and office and sometimes I backup or transfer files using a 8GB USB thumb drive (another way is to use Dropbox). This works perfectly fine until one day I met a 4.x GB file and OOPS! FAT32 filesystem does not allow a single file with that size! As a result, I tried to search for a mulit-platform supported filesystem which also supports large files. I tried NTFS. It works fine with Windows and Ubuntu but it can only be read from MacOSX, without write... When I was going to give up, a friend suggested this Lifehacker article to me (thanks again to my friend!). According to that article, I added NTFS write function to the MacOSX system and now my problem is solved~

The steps are simple:
  1. Download and install MacFUSE from here
  2. Download and install NTFS-3G for Mac OSX from here
  3. Restart your Mac
  4. Enjoy~