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Ntfs2btrfs

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.

Usage

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.

If you are using WinBtrfs, you will need to clear the readonly flag on the image subvolume before you can delete it.

On Linux, as root:

ntfs2btrfs /dev/sda1

Installation

On Windows, go to the Releases page and download the latest Zip file, or use Scoop.

For Linux:

For other distributions or operating systems, you will need to compile it yourself - see below.

Changelog

Compilation

On Windows, open the source directory in a recent version of MSVC, right-click on CMakeLists.txt, and click Compile.

On Linux:

mkdir build
cd build
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.

What works

What doesn't work

Can I boot Windows from Btrfs with this?

Yes, if the stars are right. See Quibble.