Okay I have a dual boot computer, it’s hardly ever off. However I do restart it fairly often to switch between Windows and Linux and I am concerned that if I created a vault using say the windows client of maidsafe it would not be able to be recognized by the Linux client of Maidsafe and therefore I’d be penalized for having the vault “offline” even tho my computer wasn’t offline and the drive the data was on was accessable. Basically I think vaults should be like music or picture files, that is federated somehow, and the clients are the only thing that’s operating system dependent. Is this already the case or do I have reason to be worried?
The vault lives on a filesystem, so you’re asking if MaidSafe will support Linux with NTFS partitions.
Obviously I can’t answer for the project, but if I were in charge I wouldn’t try to address this use case scenario for you - I’d ask you to pick the primary OS and have your vaults there and use the secondary in a VM (if you want to farm SafeCoins).
If you shared the same HDD (formatted with ExFAT) with both the Windows Vault and the Linux Vault, you wouldn’t be penalised too much I wouldn’t think.
Only the developers can answer this, or someone who digs deep in the code.
If it’s currently supported, you also need to know if there are likely to be reasons to drop it later.
EDIT: A couple of months ago one of the developers was going deep into the issues of cross-filesystem support on the Google group, so if you don’t get an answer here, search for that and ask him.
While my Linux and Windows partitions are formatted differently and obviously have different file systems I have a third partition I use for storage and exchange which I keep as FAT for that very reason.
Like I said it’s not enough to have a partition you (or your OS) can use. You need to have a filesystem that MaidSafe can use.
Because NTFS - unlike ExFAT - is more likely to be supported (if MaidSafe is to be supported on Windows), it may be a good shot, but IMO there’s no reason for the project to support cross-mounting because it’s an edge scenario. So even if whatever FS you choose works for you, if you ever encounter any vault or storage-related problem you’ll first be asked to repeat it on a supported FS and then come back.
Well then this could be a problem as as I said I use a dual boot system. And I don’t see why Maidsafe wouldn’t support universal file systems like FAT32, since pretty much every usb stick and external hard drive is formatted like that.
Might be OK for chunkstore, it will require copying the vault config and private keys to 2 places though. We will test this use case and see how it fares. Of course when I say we 
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I don’t care how it’s done so long as the proceedure is fairly straightforward and I don’t get penalized for it.
There will be degradation in performance if switching of and on or rebooting, I imagine very trivial though.
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Of course, THAT I expected. What I don’t want is for the system not to read the vault while my computer is online using either system.
You could install 2 vaults as well, a windows one and linux one, then you wont need to worry about protecting and moving keys around, it may reap the same rewards? Interesting to model and see though.
Again, you’re right, it can be done and it’s probably not even complicated, but it adds 20 more QA tests (assuming you want it tested and supported?) right off the bat.
Windows 7 and 8, OS X, 2-3 flavors of Linux, and then various cycling/switching combos among each of them.
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Well I definitely think this should be tested and supported because I’m not the only one with a dual boot computer.
That’s how I’m understanding this. You would then share the same dedicated HDD between both vaults, providing both OS can see the HDD. I would choose ExFAT as it’s seen by Windows, Linux, Mac and allows for large volume sizes/file counts.
SAFEcoin earned by either vault can go to the same wallet address.
Does that work?
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Should do 
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But isn’t one’s reputation in the network, and subsequent GET requests, dependent on how long any given vault is active? If I run Linux vault 50% of the time and Windows Vault 50% of the time wouldn’t I get fewer GET requests and such than if i had 1 vault on all the time?
From what I can tell, it’s the availability of the chunks that counts most…so barring the minute it takes to reboot, they are always available.
…but do both vaults use the same Private ID I wonder:
The Private ID (also called MAID, MaidSafe Anonymous ID) is the main one users will need to be able to store data to the network privately. Without this, you’ll be still be able to access public data on the network, but not modify anything.
It’s also the one which ties you to your vault(s), each of which has their own ID (aka PMID, Proxy MaidSafe ID). It won’t be human-readable and is unlikely to need to be touched by any user.
For example, it’s this ID which we currently pass to Drive to allow the virtual filesystem to store chunks to the network. But there’s no user action involved there beyond logging in to the network, the app will just retrieve the key from the session data once the user logs in.