PM 4.5.4 and read-only file system (NTFS)

[wiesiek]

Kirk,

I just found out (the hard way) that PM 4.5.4 does not warn you if you "work" with a read-only drive. I have ingested the pictures on my laptop and then, after coming home, I color- and star-rated them on my main PC. The next day all the ratings were "gone". I was astonished. After checking the problem very carefully it turned out that my new external USB 3.0 drive has been formatted with NTFS... The NTFS permission system on the PC discovered that the directory containing the pictures was created on a different machine and effectively the whole directory became read-only....

The question is if PM could have warned me when I was happily rating the pictures on a read-only file system?

All the best
Wiesiek

[Kirk Baker]

Wiesiek,

I just found out (the hard way) that PM 4.5.4 does not warn you if you "work" with a read-only drive. I have ingested the pictures on my laptop and then, after coming home, I color- and star-rated them on my main PC. The next day all the ratings were "gone". I was astonished. After checking the problem very carefully it turned out that my new external USB 3.0 drive has been formatted with NTFS... The NTFS permission system on the PC discovered that the directory containing the pictures was created on a different machine and effectively the whole directory became read-only....

The question is if PM could have warned me when I was happily rating the pictures on a read-only file system?

If it were written to do so, then yes, it could either have prevented any changes, or warned you.  But PM is not written to care about read-only file systems.  This was done to make it possible for people to work with read-only media such as CD-ROMs who would then do a copy to another drive which would preserve their edits that were still in memory.

-Kirk

[wiesiek]

Kirk,

the possibility of working with a read-only file system seems useful. What I would love PM to do though is to warn me at least before I quit it - so if I worked with a r-o file system  "without knowing it" I would have a possibility to save my work... Such a one-time warning shouldn't be too difficult to implement i hope...

All the best
Wiesiek

[Hayo Baan]

Sounds like a valuable option. I've had to help a number of people with this problem. Read-only external drives is a fairly common problem with Windows; when you reinstall the OS, or hook up the drive to another machine, for instance, chances are your external disk becomes read-only without a warning. Also Mac users with a external USB drive formatted NTFS may face this problem.

It would be great if PM checked the success of file writes and warn in case this didn't work.

Cheers,
    Hayo