If you are dualbooting Windows and Ubuntu on your computer, you will know that you can easily read and write to your NTFS partition from your Ubuntu desktop. One thing though, your Ubuntu does not automount the NTFS partition by default. Everytime you need to access the NTFS partition, you have to first go to your Nautilus and click on the NTFS drive (and enter your password) to mount it before you can access it.

A good way to workaround this is to make your Ubuntu automount your NTFS partition upon booting up. While this can be easily fixed by changing the fstab file, it involves hitting the terminal and edit the root file, which maybe a big turn off for newbies and it could possibly crash your system if it is not handled properly.

To fix this issue the simpler way, we can install the application PySDM and access the storage device manager with a simple to use and user-friendly interface.

If you have files that are bigger than 4GB in size, you will find that you can’t back them up to your external hard disk, even though it has 1TB of storage space. The reason being, when you first bought the hard disk, it is pre-formatted with FAT32 format, and in case you don’t know, FAT32 has a 4GB file size restriction. This means that it can’t store files that are bigger than 4GB in size.

A good way to overcome this is to reformat the external hard disk to NTFS format. NTFS does not has a 4GB file restriction and can be accessed easily from Windows, Mac and Linux (with the help of NTFS-3G).