FUSE and USB hard disk drive with ext4 - files are not found

[RimRunner]

I use a USB hard disk which has a ext4 file system with FUSE

Now many user programs tend to lose track of files on that disk (showing just empty mount point). Directories and files on that HDD appear once or few times and then programs needs to be restarted to read/write the drive again. Midnight Commander does not find files on that drive at all. The same thing with Firefox's download (whereas file browsing seems to work).

Commands I use:

kldload fusefs
lklfuse -o type=ext4,allow_other /dev/da1s3 /hd

What might be the reason and how to fix it?

(Sorry for initially posting this to a wrong section. Potentially this may belong to the peripherals section as well but that depends on the answer)

 

[T-Daemon]

What might be the reason and how to fix it?

The problem seems to be a bug. There is a one year old (unresolved) issue opened on the projects Github repository:

Thunar,Caja,nemo,pcmanfm can't see the content of any ext4 mounted disk with lklfuse on FreeBSD 13 · Issue #494 · lkl/linux

Hello. I've logged in FreeBSD as a normal user,I've mounted the ext4 partition in the fstab file with this line : /dev/ada0s1 /mnt/ada0s1 fuse ro,failok,late,mountprog=/usr/local/bin/lklfuse,type=e...

github.com

There is sysutils/fusefs-ext2, which claims

Fuse-ext2 is a multi OS FUSE module to
mount ext2, ext3 and ext4 file system
devices and/or images with read write
support.

This is not a recommendation! I don't know that program, never used it. If you use it, you use it on your own risk.

Since I experienced data corruption on a ext4 partition when mounted with the ext2fs(5) kernel module, I don't trust any third party programs to mount ext4 read/write on FreeBSD.

If the data on the ext4 file system is important, I would mount ext4 file systems only from a Linux virtual machine with their native utility and NFS share the mount with the FreeBSD system.

It's not so convenient but I can be (relatively) sure the file system doesn't get corrupted.