Finally ready to switch my final windows device over to linux, but I'm running into a problem. NTFS drives aren't a good idea under Linux, but my 4 NTFS drives are this full. I own zero extra hard drives, and do not want to spend $300 on another one. 
How can I bring these files into Bazzite WITHOUT just wiping everything and re-downloading 10+ terabytes of movies, shows, music, games, and other data I refuse to delete?
NTFS works fine on Linux. You can't install Linux on an NTFS filesystem because NTFS doesn't support UNIX permissions, but you can mount these filesystems read-write to any arbitrary sub-directory and use them as you please.
The tricky thing is, if you have no more drives, you will need to shrink one of these NTFS filesystems to make room for a Linux-compatible filesystem (ext4, btrfs, xfs, etc) to actually install a Linux distro. Microsoft has a minimal amount of info here, but I don't have a Windows machine at my disposal to test this. Shrinking an NTFS partition should also be possible via gparted (which is available in LiveCD/LiveUSB form). Either way, it is a potentially dangerous operation. On a nearly-full filesystem it will be very slow, and if the power goes out or something in the middle of the process,
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I usually allocate 400GB for a Linux rootfs, but 200GB should be comfortable if you aren't installing a million packages.
I can attest that I shrank an active W10 partition and dual booted it alongside an arch based distro and did not have problems. Doesn't mean I'd recommend dual booting tho.
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no dont suggest using ntfs under linux no no no no no no no no.
At least caveat it for christs sake
yeah ime they will just bork after a while and need
chkdskor defragging which you can't do on linux so it's a big pita??? As a Linux power user for over a decade I genuinely don't know what possible caveat there is. I've used NTFS drives under Linux every day and the only problems I've ever had were when I mounted the drives in Windows because it loves to fuck with NTFS settings and set dirty bits and stuff.
I dual-boot Linux and Windows, on their own drives, and then have two big 4TB shared NTFS drives on which EVERYTHING - Media, games, programs, docs, etc goes. I dinnae overexaggerate when I say I have had a total of zero problems that weren't directly caused by Windows.
So zero problems except for the problems caused by dual booting, something first time linux users might do. Sounds like a caveat to me.
Apparently the 7.1 kernel has a full rewrite i may try but fuse and ntfs3 wasn’t decades of no issues in my experience. But ofc thats trumped by your experience
I apologise - I'm not saying one's experience is invalid, just that I really honestly ain't seen problems.
True I suppose that dual booting has the caveat - disable fast startup and always shut down cleanly if you don't want Windows to fuck up your NTFS.
Sorry I was having a series of bad migraines and health scares I overreacted. So things I would list would be
Sorry for being aggressive having a bad life rn
RE: partioning.
I strongly recommend that users set up separate partitions for home and root. I use LVM and it's awesome for snapshot reasons, but I think btrfs does everything and is easier to set up for a new user?
My setup atm (8 year old install, many partitions inherited as far back as 2004):
root: 80G (LaTeX lol) homes: 216G (user files, stuff installed only for me etc) media: 364G games: 541G mail: 20G (I host my own email and download to my computer) archive: 11T (long term storage on rust)
That way if I want to e.g. backup just my user files and not all my legitimately obtained and licensed movies I can just backup homes and not chase down files. Or if I want to install a different OS or fix a broken one I only need to look at root.
Start them small and extend them as needed. You don't have to plan in advance!
This is a very good idea (and my personal practice). It allows you to replace the OS without touching your personal files. Only reason I didn't suggest it is it looked like available space was already very limited.
It is certainly possible to use Btrfs subvolumes instead of a separate partition, but many Linux distro GUI installers do not have robust support for this and will prevent you from using the same partition for different mountpoints (they typically don't understand or provide a way to set the btrfs-specific
subvol=mount option). On a manual distribution like Arch or Gentoo this isn't a problem at all, but I've had to get creative when using GUI installers for Debian and Solus. Fedora's GUI installer "supports" it, but last time I did it, it triggered another bug in the process later on based on a similar assumption.It is easy enough to do post-install (turning /home into a subvolume and adding it to fstab), but you will still have a hard time later on replacing only the OS, which is the main point of setting things up like this.
If people are willing to read a bit the archwiki install section on setting up LVM is very good and I used to use it to teach newbies when I worked as a sysadmin.
Wow this sounds like a great setup
the mount points are
I dual boot and actually have a second NVME drive with Bazzite on it, but it's not visible under Windows.
It seems like it's just not possible to have games (on the F drive) accessible to both without problems? Bazzite says something about it being a bad idea to run games from an NTFS drive every time I mount it.
If you're dual-booting, there are some potential problems. The biggest danger comes from hibernation. Hibernating one OS and then booting the other OS and modifying the files (even incidentally just by mounting the filesystem), and then loading the hibernated OS will cause very bad things to happen. To the best of my knowledge, the Linux NTFS drivers refuses to operate on a filesystem which appears to be hibernated, but I do not know if the inverse is true.
Without knowing the exact text of the warning you're getting, I'm assuming it is a "this is not officially supported, don't blame us and don't send us bug reports" sort of deal. From what I gather, the most likely cause of problems is the potential for creating files with illegal names on the NTFS filesystem (filenames containing a ':' for instance). There is an unofficial guide on the Proton wiki about running Windows games in Proton which are stored on a shared NTFS partition which covers the relevant potential issues.
If the main risk is games not running correctly, I wouldn't lose any sleep.
This setup is not ideal, but neither is having 10TB of games turned into 20TB of games so you can duplicate them on separate filesystems. A compromise of some sort is required. In the longer run, I would aim to replace one of these NTFS filesystems with a Linux filesystem and install games there that you don't play on Windows any more.
Would an overlay filesystem work? Its been a long time since I looked at it (and it was for very different purposes) but if you can get NTFS game drive mounted as a read only layer of an overlay fs and then idk some ext4 as the writeable layer, you can prevent writing data to the NTFS drive and making windows sad with illegal filenames, while also getting to like, yk, save your savegames and whatnot.
Might make loading times pretty long tho. Idk what the overhead is for an overlay fs.
Fortunately the D and E drives are Movies and TV, respectively. F is games. My plan is to run Linux 99% of the time, and I can probably keep the few games or random pieces of software I can only run under Windows on the windows C drive.
Basically I just want to have a Windows SSD as a backup.
Would it be better to reformat the D and E drives as exFAT if I can cycle the content through another drive or something? I'd like to be able to access those two drives under both Bazzite and Windows.
I think exFAT would be a step down from NTFS. NTFS is a journaling filesystem which makes it a lot more robust against data corruption than exFAT. It also has a number of more advanced features (for a 30 year old filesystem) like symlinks, transparent compression, and sparse files. NTFS is also less prone to fragmentation than the FAT family of filesystems. On the other hand, exFAT doesn't eliminate any of the potential compatibility problems (like the potential to create a file named "C:"). The only thing exFAT has going for it is that Microsoft has actually published a specification for it, but in practice NTFS has been reverse-engineered enough to have multiple reliable third-party implementations.
If you need Windows and Linux to access the same filesystem, NTFS is the least bad option (the best option is probably setting up a NAS for this amount of data). Another option is to install third-party ext2/3/4 or btrfs drivers on Windows, but last time I looked into this, they weren't very robust.
Ideally yes.
If you can't then it will still all work most of the time but occasionally the drives will unmount from linux with block errors etc and will not work until you boot windows and run chkdsk. You can use ntfsfix on linux but it doesn't always work.
Imo it's best to leave D and E as NTFS. Maybe down the line you'll end up with some swap space (maybe after you get that SSD for Windows), but for now it'll work. I'd focus on getting the C drive empty as you can using the spare space in your other drives, then use it for Linux with a 200GB partition at the end of the drive for Windows.
I can't advise re: games.
This is true, writing to a hibernated system is not a thing you can unknowingly do.
I've never hibernated on Linux but Windows is basically incapable of mounting any UNIX filesystem, so I can't see that ever happening.
Yes, but if the NFTS was mounted by Linux when it hibernated, suddenly this becomes a possibility.