NTFS compatibility

Linux compatibility

Full and safe read/write of NTFS is provided by the Paragon NTFS for Linux driver.

Windows compatibility

While the different NTFS versions have a great degree of both forward and backward compatibility, there are technical considerations for mounting newer NTFS volumes in older versions of Windows. This affects dual-booting, and external portable hard drives.
For example, "Previous Versions" (a.k.a. Volume Shadow Copy) are lost because the older OS doesn't understand how to keep the new features' data updated.

MacOS compatibility

Mac OS X versions 10.3 and later offer read-only NTFS support. Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X beats down the barriers between Windows and Mac®OS. It effectively solves the communication problems between the Mac® system and NTFS - providing full read&write access to Windows NTFS partitions under Mac® OS X.

Compatibility with FAT

Microsoft currently provides a tool (convert.exe) to convert HPFS (only on Windows NT 3), FAT16 and, on Windows 2000 and higher, FAT32 to NTFS, but not the other way around. Various third-party tools are all capable of safely resizing NTFS partitions. Microsoft added the ability to shrink or expand a partition with Windows Vista, but this capability is limited because it will not relocate the master file table, thus limiting the ability to shrink a partition to roughly half of its original size.

For historical reasons, the versions of Windows that do not support NTFS all keep time internally as local zone time, and therefore so do all file systems other than NTFS that are supported by current versions of Windows. However, Windows NT and its descendants keep internal timestamps as UTC and make the appropriate conversions for display purposes. Therefore, NTFS timestamps are in UTC. This means that when files are copied or moved between NTFS and non-NTFS partitions, the OS needs to convert timestamps on the fly. But if some files are moved when daylight saving time (DST) is in effect, and other files are moved when standard time is in effect, there can be some ambiguities in the conversions. As a result, especially shortly after one of the days on which local zone time changes, users may observe that some files have timestamps that are incorrect by one hour. Due to the differences in implementation of DST between the northern and southern hemispheres, this can result in a potential timestamp error of up to 4 hours in any given 12 months.