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Is there any way that windows could access my home folder when dual-booting? I can't put my home folder on an NTFS partition, and Windows can't read or write to the default ext4 file system, and I don't know any file system that both windows and linux can read and write to and you can put your home folder on. And putting the files on my windows partition in ubuntu would not really be ideal, I basically want my personal for windows and ubuntu to be the same folder so when I make a change on one OS it will be saved on the other OS. Although files like config files and browser profiles would be seperate from each OS.

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Ext2Read works well. It can also open & read disk images ( eg: Wubi disk images)

Ext2Read is an explorer like utility to explore ext2/ext3/ext4 files. It now supports LVM2 and EXT4 extents. It can be used to view and copy files and folders. It can recursively copy entire folders. It can also be used to view and copy disk and file

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However, it doesn't support removable devices. It only supports internal HDD devices. For external and removable, get Linux Reader by Diskinternals

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Windows and Linux can both read/write to FAT32 file systems. However, FAT32 file systems have the limitation that any single file can only be approx 4 GB in size, as a maximum.

Alternatively there are ways to read EXT file systems via windows. Be careful: I tried this way once and all I got was blue screens in windows.

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  • FAT32 doesn't work well for user home directories for the same reason that NTFS doesn't: no Unix access permission model. Oct 24, 2014 at 1:29
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While it's difficult to impossible to have a Unix user home on a NTFS file system, it's still possible for Ubuntu/Linux to read from and write to them. If you want the convenience of having the same directory structure on Linux and Windows you can

  1. automatically mount the NTFS file system on boot¹, and
  2. create symbolic links in your Linux home directory to folders in your Windows home directory, e. g. by either

    • dragging them to the destination in Nautilus, holding Alt while releasing them, and selecting Create link, or
    • in menu bar of Nautilus selecting Edit > Create link.

Since Windows has symbolic links too, technically the same can be done with reversed roles and Ext2Fsd. Unfortunately the ext file system driver for Windows isn't nearly as well maintained and stable as the NTFS driver for Linux and write support is experimental for ext4 and will likely eat your data.

¹ Ask me about it in the comments if you don't know and can't find how to do that.

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  • I think this might work. I'll try it in a virtual machine before I vote your answer up.
    – user341713
    Oct 24, 2014 at 20:27
  • Mounting NTFS volumes in Ubuntu is pretty safe. The driver is mature and there are no known major corruptions. Oct 24, 2014 at 22:33

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