Z18 feedback and strange behaviour in saving my data on an external SSD

Feedback
1

Hello everybody,

I am using Z17.3 Core in multi-boot environment for a year+ now and am pretty happy with it. Being curious I have installed Z18 in a separate partition beginning of October and have the following items to feedback so far...

1/ While Z17 was installed on my PC without any problem, the installation of Z18 crashed when installing the boot changes. It has been a bit of an exercise to correct this with the help of a specialist. I see that I am not the only one having problems with the boot in installing Z18.

2/ I discovered the new presentation of Z18. While the rounded corners of the task-bar did not impress me so much, I much prefer the Menu of Z17.3 than that of Z18. a/ It mimics uselessly Windows 10 without its capability of clicking on a letter to go direct to the letter section, and b/ the shutdown/restart needs one more clic than with Z17... This should be reworked.

3/ The worst is when I intended to do a back-up of my data on my external SSD. I am using fantastic FreeFileSync (FFS) and this time I had a big number of pictures to back-up. I had 2 big problems a/ FFS copied all the pictures onto the SSD with 0 bytes in size, only the file-title. In order to complete the work, I deleted these files and tried to use the manual copy/paste to save the pictures. I then got blocked because all the folders of the SSD changed to « read only » as per the picture below.

Capture d’écran du 2025-10-26 21-35-45
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I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers...

2

If the external SSD is formatted using NTFS, the file system native to Windows, that could explain the permission issue. Try launching Disks from the applications menu, select this drive, and then in the little cog button to show some options. There, you have an option that says "Take ownership":

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3

Hi Zenzen, Thank you very much for your answer. Yes the external SSD is ntfs, however it never beahaved like this in Z17. I must say that I had a huge number of pictures from the telephone camera and whatsapp to save. Since then when I run FFS it runs OK. The only thing that happens from time to time in Z17 is when I restart from Windows in Zorin, Windows keeps holding all files from my INTERNAL ntfs partition. I know how to fix this by logging into Windows and exit again and this time everything is back OK. This was a long time ago. Now it never happens.

Let's hold on this point for now. I can live with it since it seems to run OK by now.

I have other issues with Z18 that I will describe soon.

Thank you.