If you are like me, you would probably be using a Mac, Linux and Windows and a website hosting server which in most cases is a Linux. Transferring and using files across these platforms is never an easy task.
I am listing some of the problems I faced and then solutions for them.
1. If you have dual boot machine where you have windows or linux or mac, you cant mount the drive on which other OS is installed.
2. If you have website where you need to keep modifying files, FTP isn’t a good solutions. Wouldnt it be just great, to mount the remote drive locally and start working on it directly?
3. If you have two computers, say one windows and one mac, and one hard-disk for data backup, you cant access the same disk simultaneously from both computers.
FTP, WinSCP, SMB and many such solutions were created to solve cross platform file systems access. But still, there isnt a single solution which works across all platform.
Access to NTFS disk and mounting remote disk/folder locally.
1. FUSE project which covers mostly all OS except windows is currently the best solutions available. Its port for Mac OS X called MacFuse when used with SSHFS allows any Unix based OS to mount locally and when used with NTFS-3G allows to modify any NTFS formatted disks.
Accessing Mac formatted disk on Windows.
2. MacDrive utility on windows allows read write access to any Mac formatted disk (including iPod and iPhone)
Using a hard disk simultaneously.
3. A firewire hard-drive when connected to a bus can be accessed simultaneously from different machines, provided both machines can understand the file system (such as FAT is recognised by most of the OSs). The other recent solution is to connect such backup drive to wireless router which supports USB Disk and then access it from both machines. AirPort Extreme, a wireless router from Apple does support this functionality. The AirPort creates SMB Share out of this disk and allows it mount on both computers.