I tried Paragon's ntfs3 and it didn't go well

Like many users finding themselves dual booting Windows and Linux, I have an entry in my /etc/fstab to automatically mount the Windows partition. And because I need read/write support, my only option has always been, of course, ntfs-3g. This, however, changed sometime in September 2021, when Paragon Software’s ntfs3 driver was merged into the Linux kernel.

Recently I’ve upgraded my laptop to Fedora 37 which includes, along with kernel 6.x, the new ntfs3 driver. So I decided to modify the /etc/fstab entry for the Windows partition to use the new, fast ntfs3 instead of the old, slow ntfs-3g. Everything’s been fine up until today, when I noticed that a folder disappeared from the NTFS filesystem. The weird thing is that the directory wasn’t visible with ls or any GUI file manager, but I could still cd into it. Similarly, enclosed files weren’t visible with ls, but could still be accessed by programs, knowing the filenames. For example, my torrent client could still seed existing files from there. This behavior screamed only one thing: filesystem corruption. So I booted into Windows to schedule a chkdsk run, which indeed fixed the thing.

I can’t prove it was a bug in the ntfs3 driver to cause this, but I think it’s reasonable to think so. Especially considering I’ve never experienced anything like this with ntfs-3g, which I’ve been using since… forever. There’s at least one place on the web that seems to corroborate this thesis.

All this to say that maybe we should stick to the bad good old ntfs-3g, at least until we hear from Paragon itself.