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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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A reliable way to determine if ntfs permissions were inherited

I have a somewhat obscure question here. What I need: To determine if the permissions (or, strictly speaking, a specific ACE of a DACL) of a file/folder was inherited. How I tried to solve this: using winapi bindings for python (win32security…
shylent
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Getting a file checksum directly from the filesystem instead of calculating it explicitly

I'm guessing that a typical filesystem tends to keep some kind of checksum/CRC/hash of every file it manages, so it can detect file corruption. Is that guess correct? And if yes, is there a way to access it? I'm primarily interested in Windows and…
Branko Dimitrijevic
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Master File Table cleanup utility?

Can anyone recommend a tool for MFT cleanup? I want to in my MFT restore the entries for files which once existed but have been deleted to a "pristine" state, with zeroed out entries.
user82238
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What factors can lead to Win32 error 665 (file system limitation)?

I maintain an application that collects data from a datalogger and appends that data to the end of a binary file. The nature of this system is that the file can grow large (> 4 gigabytes) small steps at a time. On of the users of my application…
Jon Trauntvein
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How can I use batch to determine if a computer is using FAT32 or NTFS?

How can I use batch to determine if a computer is using FAT32 or NTFS and is this even possible.
carstorm
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Support for case sensitive Windows directories in NIO.2

Recent Windows 10 builds feature an ability to mark a single NTFS directory (not the whole file system) as case sensitive, via fsutil.exe: Per-directory case sensitivity and WSL How to Enable Case Sensitive File and Folder Names on Windows 10 If I…
Bass
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Avoid updating last-accessed date/time when reading a file

We're building a Windows-based application that traverses a directory structure recursively, looking for files that meet certain criteria and then doing some processing on them. In order to decide whether or not to process a particular file, we have…
Anodyne
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Cannot set Full Control permission for folder

I'm trying to add the Full Control permission (for a NT service account) to a folder through C#. However, the permission is not set, what I am missing here? var directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(@"C:\Test"); var directorySecurity =…
user584018
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Getting full file attributes for files managed by Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive allows file to be stored either locally, remotely or in the both ways. This is determined by new file attributes which appeared in the Windows 10: FILE_ATTRIBUTE_PINNED 0x00080000 FILE_ATTRIBUTE_UNPINNED …
Mikhail Kupchik
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Showing NTFS timestamp with 100 nsec granularity

I understand that the FAT file system stores its time stamps for files (modify date, etc.) with a 2 second granularity, and NTFS stores them with a 100 nsec granularity. I'm using VBScript with FileSystemObject to show file details. The function…
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Delphi 2009 classes / components to read/write file permissions

Does anyone have a set of classes / components that will work with Delphi 2009 (Unicode) to read and write NTFS file permissions? There was a thing called "NTSet" - but they stopped development at Delphi 2006 about 3 years ago :-( Any other…
marc_s
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Does ReFS handle small files and large deletes faster than NTFS?

I work with developer tools like git and npm/yarn that often generate lots of small files. I know from NTFS performance and large volumes of files and directories (and from experience) that NTFS doesn't handle these as fast as most Unix…
mikemaccana
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dumping the content of the $mft file

for some commercial project I'm doing I need to be able to read the actual data stored on the $mft file. I found a gpl lib that could help, but since its gpl i can't integrate it into my code. could someone please point me to a project that i could…
user407487
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Walking the NTFS Change Journal on Windows 10

I'm trying to read the NTFS Change Journal but I've noticed that all the example code I can find fails on Windows 10, even though it works on Windows 7. For example, Microsofts own example Walking a Buffer of Change Journal Records works on Windows…
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Speed up NTFS file enumeration (using FSCTL_ENUM_USN_DATA and NTFS MFT / USN journal)

I'm enumerating the files of a NTFS hard drive partition, by looking at the NTFS MFT / USN journal with: HANDLE hDrive = CreateFile(szVolumePath, GENERIC_READ, FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, NULL, NULL); DWORD cb =…
Basj
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