Monday, October 5, 2009

Tuxera NTFS for Mac

Tuxera Ltd. is now announcing the availability of the first release candidate of Tuxera NTFS for Mac, our commercial NTFS offering for Mac OS X. The release candidate can be used in 'trial' mode for 15 days. During these 15 days you can decide whether or not to purchase the product from our online shop.

When you have purchased a license, you will get a product key sent to you via email. You can then use the product key to activate the already installed copy of Tuxera NTFS (you can also choose to activate your license at install time).

Download Tuxera NTFS for Mac (Release Candidate)
Release announcement
Online shop (for purchasing a Tuxera NTFS for Mac license)

System requirements: A Mac (Intel or PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.6 (32-bit kernel).

Tuxera NTFS for Mac builds upon NTFS-3G to deliver a stable, high performance NTFS driver for Mac OS X. The main focus for development has been to improve performance and at the same time minimize the risk of data corruption, even in situations such as system crashes and accidential disconnection of hard drives without proper unmounting. We have also made sure to add a few more features, such as support for the Mac OS X 'locked' and 'hidden' attributes, support for putting files in the 'Trash' bin instead of just deleting them, etc.

We need people to test this release candidate before putting it in 'release' mode, so any help would be appreciated.

The first 3 people to find a serious bug will be rewarded with a Tuxera NTFS for Mac license. This does not include the following bugs, which are known:

  1. Tuxera NTFS installer displays an error message after installing on systems with MacFUSE > 2.0.3 installed. (This is a MacFUSE bug.)
  2. Switching between NTFS-3G and Tuxera NTFS preference panes within the same System Preferences session leads to bad interactions and confusing error messages. (This will be fixed in the non-RC release version.)

41 comments:

Phil_C said...

Hi,
I am transferring 14.9Gb, using Firewaire 400 between a Mac Mini and external 1Tb and its taking about 7-8 mins. It appears stable and is light on resources..I would be keen to see what its like on 50Gb and above.. will try that next hopefully...

adisor19 said...

I'm sorry if i sound redundant, but does this mean that NTFS-3g for Mac will no longer be developed as you are instead selling a commercial version of it ?

Thank for clarifying,

Adi

markus said...

same question as above.

Anonymous said...

how can you take an open source project, add special "stuff" to it and then charge for it?

Erik said...

adisor19 and markus:

No, NTFS-3G will still be developed, updated, bugfixed.
Tuxera NTFS is a separate product intended for those that want a stable, high performance, commercially supported NTFS driver with a number of improvements over NTFS-3G.

I have been putting a lot of time into developing NTFS-3G for Mac OS X over the years and by buying Tuxera NTFS you can give something back to the people behind NTFS-3G, and at the same time ensure that the open source version will continue to be maintained by competent people. ;)

Because of the Tuxera NTFS release (and many other things) I haven't been able to dedicate any time to updating NTFS-3G lately, but as soon as Tuxera NTFS goes out of Release Candidate mode I'll get NTFS-3G up to date as well (uninstalling on Snow Leopard is the most prominent issue at the moment).

Erik said...

Anonymous, October 7, 2009 7:31 PM:

We have permission / agreements with all copyright holders. The largest contributors to NTFS-3G are involved in Tuxera Ltd. and NTFS-3G has been sold in a commercial flavour for many years to embedded device manufacturers among others.

As a special bonus, we also have agreements with Microsoft, clearing all doubts about the legal status of the NTFS implementation (possible patents related to NTFS etc.).
We can of course not offer any such guarantees to open source users, as the agreement is with Tuxera Ltd. and its customers.

Anonymous said...

Erik,

What's the price point going to be once it's available in the store?

Thanks,
Vos

Anonymous said...

i found a bug: ntfs-3g doesn't run on 64bit kernals.

Erik said...

Duff:
That's right. Just as it says in the system requirements above. (So it's not a bug, obviously.)
You can try out an experimental new MacFUSE build here which loads in Snow Leopard 64-bit, but it's untested, unsupported, and on your own risk. It may crash your system or corrupt data (or it might work).

This is not a huge problem since no current Mac (except for Xserve) run the 64-bit kernel by default. If you force it to load, you're running a configuration that's unsupported by Apple. Most users really should avoid that.

Because of the hybrid layout of the 32-bit XNU kernel you don't really need the 64-bit kernel unless you need to address more than 32 GiB of memory.

Erik said...

Anonymous, October 8, 2009 12:21 AM:

The price will be about 25-30 euros.

ran said...

I have a Mac Pro and it's running 64-bit by default. Is there no solution for me?

Erik said...

ran:

Really? That's news to me. I thought that only Xserves running Mac OS X Server would boot the 64-bit kernel by default.

What you can do is of course to add '-x32' to the boot options, thus making Snow Leopard boot the 32-bit kernel.

You can also try the trick mentioned in this forum topic:
http://tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1305

MacPress said...

is this can run on snow leopard with 64bit

mionica said...

Question. NTFS-3G 2009.4.4 apparently didn't flush the MFT / logfile / some other structure to disk on a regular basis; it happened to me that after prolongued usage, i.e. copying thousands of files to an external NTFS hard drive, an OSX crash would make all that data (we're talking over 100GB), well, disappear - files wouldn't show in 7's Explorer, and running a chkdsk on the thing simply discarded the written data. It also took long as hell.

It's true that during regular usage the thing is very stable. But I don't plan on spending one cent on a solution until I'm assured that it flushes its caches both when driver is idle _and_ on a regular basis, instead of only when it has to (for instance, on a 15" NVIDIA-based MacBook Pro with 4GB - where the aforementioned incident happened - I'm pretty sure there was enough room to keep all the $-files in RAM with no need to flush them whatsoever).

Any input on this subject will be appreciated.

Erik said...

mionica:

This has been a primary focus when developing Tuxera NTFS. We have written a completely new caching layer which has a maximum time that data is kept off disk. The driver flushes data regularly to disk in a background thread.
The background thread checks for dirty pages every second, to make sure that data is always flushed down to disk as soon as possible.

I hope that was an answer to your question.

Erik said...

MacPress:

You can use Tuxera NTFS on Snow Leopard with a 64-bit CPU.
However, MacFUSE is still only compatible with the 32-bit kernel, so you'll have to stick with it for the time being.

There's no real reason at this point to run the 64-bit kernel. It's not as well tested as the 32-bit kernel, and breaks compatibility with a lot of applications.... and it doesn't give you any advantage whatsoever if you're not planning on using more than 32 GiB of memory.

Ryan said...

Just to correct those of you who think that -x32 loads the 32bit kernel, you are wrong - Sorry...

-x32 loads 32bit extensions - if you use it in conjunction with arch=x86_32 you will be running the 32bit kernel.

in terminal type;

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

and you will see either see;

| | "firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">
| | "firmware-abi" = <"EFI32">

Ryan said...

Sorry I didnt finish in the other post...

The point is test it... boot -x32 and you will see your still loading the 64bit kernel.

Erik said...

Ryan:

Thanks for the clarification. I don't have a Mac that boots in 64-bit mode by default myself, so I have to way of testing this.

So are you saying adding "arch=x86_32 -x32" to the boot flags (for instance to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist ) is what is needed to force boot the 32-bit kernel on machines that otherwise would use the 64-bit one by default?

Erik said...

Ryan:

Also... does this mean that a 64-bit kernel can load 32-bit kernel extensions, since they are separate options (it doesn't seem probable, but still...)?

Anonymous said...

Hi! I just downloaded this, but my computer can't now even recognise my portable hardware. it just shows the message:Tuxera NTFS could not mount /dev/disk1s1at/Volumes/untitled because CBCIO activated with: cp.fildes =3, cp.blocksize =524288m cpitems=32
cp.ode=1
cp.flushinterval=1000
MFTMirr does not match MFT (recors 55).
Failed to mount '/dev/rdisk 1s1 ': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault ot it's a softraid/fake raid hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on windows then reboot into windows twice. the usage of the /f parameter is very important! if the device is a softRAID/FakeRAID the first activate it and mount a diffrent device under the /dev/ mapper /directory, (e.g./dev / mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1.)

I tried to delete Tuxera, but it still shows this. Can you help me?

Erik said...

Anonymous, November 11, 2009 7:55 PM:

Hi,

Did you do what the message told you to do, i.e. fix the drive in Windows using 'chkdsk'? After doing that, you should be able to use it with Tuxera NTFS.

Tuxera NTFS is very careful to mount drives that it detects to have metadata inconsistencies, to make sure that its safe to use the NTFS volume.

How did you 'delete' Tuxera NTFS? Did you uninstall it using the preference pane? In that case it should most definitely go away.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Do you have a release date in mind for the next revision of mac ntfs-3g? I'm running SL and it somehow bothers when I can't uninstall an application. Now that I have Paragon, I want to uninstall ntfs-3g but neither the uninstall button nor script would work. Thank you.

Unknown said...

Hi there, I get an error after I reboot (and it's not working).

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libfuse.2.dylib

Referenced from: /System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs_txantfs.fs/Support/tuxera_ntfs

Reason: image not found

Erik said...

Anonymous, November 21, 2009 7:05 AM:

If you only need to uninstall, a workaround is available in this forum post.

Erik said...

richard:

Did you get this error right after installing? It seems that MacFUSE is not installed, and it should have been installed with NTFS-3G.

The solution is to reinstall NTFS-3G, and make sure that MacFUSE is selected in the "Customize" options when installing (it should be selected by default, but please verify that).

If it's still not working after a reinstall, then please post a problem report in the forum.

Robert said...

Took my macbook to a friend's office w/a pc, ran chk dsk f and it worked like a charm.
Thx
Robert

Unknown said...

Hi,
Does this NTFS-3G support for 64bit mode in Snow Leopard?

Erik said...

M@Q:

No it does not at this time support the x86_64 kernel flavor, used in the Xserve rack mounted servers.
However, you can easily set these machines to boot the regular hybrid 32/64-bit kernel if you're using up to 32 GiB of memory (if you have more memory than that you need the 64-bit kernel).

Ley Pelletier said...

If you only have Linux and there is the error mentionned above (CBCIO etc...), you can also use gparted in linux and reformat in ntfs, give it a label, umount it safely, then it will works.

bängt said...

Would you please refrain from using the word "commercial" to refer to a proprietary application. This only confuses people because free & open source software can also be commercial. Commercialization has nothing to do with if the code is free or proprietary. Thank you!

Doctor Geek said...

I upgrade to SnowLeop on a mac-mini and when i log into any account my mac is stuck with apple stary screen.
i can only boot in "without extension" mode, or on Apple DVD.

I think Tux NTFS driver is guilty (but any proof at this time :).

How can i remove NTFS-3G and/or MacFuse from my HD by hand ?

Seems my mac booting in 64bits mode. If you know how to do a forced 32bits mode startup, it will be perhaps another way to log me safely again.

Erik said...

jean luc, April 20, 2010 4:36 PM:

If you're using NTFS-3G, you can remove it from the system by uninstalling it from its preference pane. Uninstalling should work well in safe mode.

MacFUSE can be removed from its preference pane too.

If this does not work, then you can manually remove the key directories/bundles by issuing the following commands in the Terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal):

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs
sudo rm -rf /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs

(if you're upgrading from Mac OS X 10.4, then the last directory could instead be /System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs)

hypeRory said...

i'm trying to remove tuxera completely because i got annoying "error while validating key" messages every minute. i went into preferences and uninstalled tuxera(ntfs-3g) and macfuse, then went into terminal and tried to remove all tuxera references. i'm STILL getting that bothersome "error while validating key" popup notification. PLS HELP!

ps - i'm running osx 10.5

hypeRory said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Erik said...

hypeRory, October 21, 2010 5:47 PM:

Hi,

Please type the following command in the Terminal (Applications->Utilitites->Terminal):

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs_txantfs.fs

This should remove all remaining files.

Anonymous said...

Make it $9.99 and you will earn a way more then selling with this price, nobody will be looking for free solutions, having excelent solution for $9.99. It is too expensive now.

Anonymous said...

I'm not gonna lie. This sucks. I uninstalled it (as much as you can un-install on a mac. ie. deleting everything associated with it) But every time I plug in a NTFS hard drive, I get an error message "Tuxera NTFS for Mac: Error while validating key. Tuxera NTFS for Mac could not validate your product key. Please contact Tuxera's email support for help."
It is actually pisssing me the **** off.

Anonymous said...

any reason to SELL (as in pay money) for a free Linux driver? which advantages does Tuxera have to let't say original ntfs-3g? Running original ntfs-3g (free) on my primary Linux laptop and I've never had any problems.. Just a thought.. am I the only one Feelin' this is stealin'? I'm aware that most mac users like to pay for software (because of the feeling "that it has to be good/work because I've paid for it").. Not mad, just courious :) because if it's legal then anybody could make this (or at least a competitor to it) :)

Erik said...

Anonymous, December 21, 2011 4:17 PM:

The people behind Tuxera NTFS for Mac are the same people that are behind NTFS-3G. So we certainly aren't stealing from anybody... the copyright holders of NTFS-3G are behind Tuxera.

In addition, sales of Tuxera NTFS for Mac contributes to funding the work of key people involved in Tuxera, which benefits the open source community as a whole.

Other companies could not do the same thing without the approval of the copyright holders (unless they also publish their changes under GPL).

It seems that many people think that just because a software is free to use it belongs to everyone, but in fact it is usually developed by a small group of people putting hard work into it. In the end they need to be able to pay their bills, and this is one business model that makes it possible for them to continue their work. :-)

NTFS-3G is still free and open source, but Tuxera NTFS for Mac contains many performance improvements and added features (many Mac-specific ones) that distinguish it from NTFS-3G. It's also being kept updated with new developments in the Mac world (like the latest OS X version), is easy to use and comes with dedicated support.

Anonymous said...

The free version doesn't install on OSX El Capitan! :(