Sharing external drive between 2 Windows systems?

There always seems to be a thread about sharing an external drive between Windows/Linux/Mac, but what about 2 windows machines? If you're using NTFS, how is everyone setting up the permissions so it will be usable on both systems? I'm not talking about having it hooked up to both at the same time, just moving files around.

 

Why do you want to set permissions in the first place? An external drive, as long as it is not mounted as part of a profile, does not have permissions by default. It is just like any flash drive.

 

Interesting, maybe that's my problem. But I have run into this many times and did not specifically set up permissions. When you move it from one machine to another, you need to take ownership or something in order to access the files. Some of the scenarios I've seen are:

- Moving a truecrypt volume between machines
- Taking a drive from my "old" machine and connecting it to the new one.

Maybe I just have a strange setup, but I've never explicitly set permissions on it.

 

if you encrypt a file, it inherently uses permissions.

when you say taking a drive from old machine and connecting it to new machine, could you be more specific? If you have files stored in a directory structure like
{drive letter}:\documents and settings\....

those are profiles and they will require permission changes.

If the files are stored in a normal fashion

{drive letter}:\music
{drive letter}:\pictures

you should not

 

Buy a nas device, connnect your external HD to that and then connect the nas to your router.

Then you'll be able to use the drive as a network drive and access it from both computers without having to unplug and plug it in.