Stay away from accessing HFS+ drives from Windows

I’ve had very negative experiences with software that allows (write) access to HFS+ from Windows. This might be common for those on dual-triple boot, such as my setup with Mac OS X and Windows [7 and later 10].

At first, this was with Windows 7 and Macdrive. I’ve tried again with Windows 10 and Paragon HFS+.

In both cases, this had led to corrupted files and corrupted partitions that were not recoverable. Luckily I’ve had backups and was able to restore everything.

Just two tips here: Disk Drill on Windows 10 was the best software I’ve found for file recoveries. For backups, Backblaze, although I’ve just migrated to Synology C2 instead.

It seems like a bad idea to try and write to HFS+ drive from Windows. Alternatively, read-only mode of Paragon works well and doesn’t corrupt files.

My preferred new way is to access the files from the NAS which in this case acts as a translation layer between OS and storage.


See also:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/timely-warning-about-paragon-hfs-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1931869

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/hfs-and-ntfs-hdds-problem-corrupt-and-missing-files-when-dual-boot-and-paragon-software-use.270410/

https://community.avid.com/forums/p/93519/716648.aspx

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/corrupted-my-os-x-boot-drive-macdrive-is-culprit.1357630/

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