Fedora Windows Migration Tool

[Casey Dahlin]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>
>
> 2008/4/1 nikhil bharadwaj <nikhil.bbharadwaj at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:nikhil.bbharadwaj at yahoo.com>>:
>
>     I have an idea of importing all the Windows documents,files,etc.
>     into the Fedora partition during the installation. Also,
>     maintaining a sync of all the files in both the OS's.
>
>     A detailed overview and concept of the idea is in the given link:
>
>     http://nikhilbharadwaj.wordpress.com/fedora-project-soc-2008/
>
>
>
> I'm sort of confused on a couple of things....
>
>  why a mirror of the data across partitions? If we are able to mount 
> ntfs on a per user basis... why not find a way to use the ntfs 
> partition as the data location for the common data for the user in 
> situations where users care about cross operating system access?
> We already have a system to redirect what directories are 
> programtically used:
> http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs
> Can't the technology here be extended to make use of an ntfs data 
> store without the complexity of mirroring?
>

Then we have the victory issue. "Hey, Fedora is great! Now I want to get 
rid of my Windows partition." Solvable but not free of charge. This does 
save the actual time cost of mirroring though, which is significant 
considering that if the user is frequently switching we have to check 
for updates to the windows side at every login.

> Why at install time.. versus an option that can be invoked for any 
> user at user creation time or any later time generally though the 
> system-config-user dialog?  Don't people have multiple users defined 
> commonly on home XP and Vista systems?  Don't we need to be able to 
> configure the OS data syncing for multiple users by mapping a fedora 
> username to the corresponding username on the XP system? 
>
I think this is/has been proposed here, but it is a good idea to begin 
offering the feature at install time, as well as make it continuously 
available post-install.


--CJD