Comment 10 for bug 175689

I went through the "upgrade to hardy" process a little over a week ago and I run into a serious problem which is very much related to this.

I basically have two 500GB USB harddrives formatted as NTFS connect to my Ubuntu machine. On these drives I have over 20 different SMB shares each and the upgrade process automatically DELETED ALL MY SHARES WITH NO WARNING WHAT SO EVER AND WITH NO CHANCE OF RECOVERY. This caused a some serious downtime problems for me. On top of that, once I got hardy up and running I could not even fix these problems because hardy will, as the bug explains, not let you share files owned by root due to the "usershare owner only = False" flag being default in Ubuntu. Imagine all the people that are running small servers with NTFS partitions like I do. This is not a nice experience for them during upgrade.

The bug that I filed about the broken upgrade process was closed as a duplicate of this bug (even though they are in fact slightly different).
Please have a look at my original bug report here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/214714

Sharing folders on NTFS drives is an important use case and it worked perfectly in previous versions of Ubuntu (so this is a regression and people are very unforgiving about regressions). I'd very much give my vote to fixing this before (or soon after) the hardy release.