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Questions tagged [ntfs]

NTFS (New Technology File System) is the primary file system used by Windows.

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft Corporation for its Windows line of operating systems, beginning with Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 2000, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and all their successors to date.

NTFS supersedes the file system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

NTFS has several improvements over FAT and HPFS such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.

Versions

The NTFS on-disk format has five released versions:

  • v1.0 with NT 3.1, released mid-1993
  • v1.1 with NT 3.5, released fall 1994
  • v1.2 with NT 3.51 (mid-1995) and NT 4 (mid-1996)
  • v3.0 from Windows 2000 ("NTFS V5.0" or "NTFS5")
  • v3.1 from Windows XP (autumn 2001; "NTFS V5.1")

NTFS Log

NTFS is a journaling file system and uses the NTFS Log ($LogFile) to record metadata changes to the volume. It is a critical functionality of NTFS (a feature that FAT/FAT32 does not provide) for ensuring that its internal complex data structures, or data moves performed by the defragmentation API, the modifications to MFT records, and indices will remain consistent in case of system crashes, and allow easy rollback of uncommitted changes to these critical data structures when the volume is remounted.

NTFS on other operating systems

Linux

The ability to read and write to NTFS is provided by the NTFS-3G driver. It is included in most distributions.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X 10.3 and later include read-only support for NTFS-formatted partitions.

References

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Get list of groups-users-permissions-special permission for a folder in Windows 2003, programatically

I use Window 2003 server, and I need get information about security folder, programatically using C#. I want create a tool for check permissions. I need get the groups, users, permissions and special permissions for a folder, C:\Documents and…
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Test in PowerShell code if a folder is a junction point?

How can I test in PowerShell code if a folder is a junction point?
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Is the ReplaceFile Windows API a convenience function only?

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MacFUSE does not appear to be installed

After installing MacFUSE and opening system Preferences -> MacFuse it looks like that it is not compatible with Mac lion and says: MacFUSE does not appear to be installed Any solution to that?
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I'm trying to wrap my head around the use of the System.Transactions namespace in C#. I've found some documentation on MSDN regarding using resource managers, but it only covers volatile, in-memory resource managers in any detail (like…
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How can I detect only deleted, changed, and created files on a volume?

I need to know if there is an easy way of detecting only the files that were deleted, modified or created on an NTFS volume. I have written a program for offsite backup in C++. After the first backup, I check the archive bit of each file to see if…
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In Windows, is there an easy way to tell if a folder has a subfile that has changed? I verified, and the last modified date on the folder does not get updated when a subfile changes. Is there a registry entry I can set that will modify this…
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How do you set MOTW (Mark of the Web) on an executable that is downloaded from the internet?
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We have complaints "from the field" (i.e. from sysadmins installing software) that cygwin "messes up" windows permissions on NTFS (Windows 7/10/2008/2012, etc). Problem Usecase The general usecase is this: Sysadmin launches some 'software…
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Change Journal for Blocks in Windows(NTFS)

I have written a backup tool that is able to backup files and images of volumes for Windows. To detect which files have changed I use the Windows Change Journal. I already use the shadow copy functionality to do a consistent copy of both the files…
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Unique file identifiers on NTFS and $Object_ID

From articles I have found online there appears to be two forms of unique identifiers for files on NTFS: Using Windows API GetFileInformationByHandle(), we can get access to the struct BY_HANDLE_FILE_INFORMATION, which contains a volume serial…
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fastest way to crawl recursive ntfs directories in C++

I have written a small crawler to scan and resort directory structures. It based on dirent(which is a small wrapper around FindNextFileA) In my first benchmarks it is surprisingy slow: around 123473ms for 4500 files(thinkpad t60p local samsung 320…
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Directory Traversal in C#

How do you traverse a folder structure using C# without falling into the trap of junction points?
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Is WriteFile atomic?

I'm designing a system that will write time series data to a file. The data is blocks of 8 bytes divided into two 4 bytes parts, time and payload. According to MSDN the WriteFile function is atomic (…
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