NTFS
proprietary file system developed by Microsoft
NT File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s.
It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with FAT. NTFS adds several features that FAT and HPFS lack, including: access control lists (ACLs); filesystem encryption; transparent compression; sparse files; file system journaling and volume shadow copy, a feature that allows backups of a system while in use.
Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family superseding the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. NTFS read/write support is available on Linux and BSD using NTFS3 in Linux and NTFS-3G in both Linux and BSD.
NTFS uses several files hidden from the user to store metadata about other files stored on the drive which can help improve speed and performance when reading data.
History
In the mid-1980s, Microsoft and IBM formed a joint project to create the next generation of graphical operating system; the result was OS/2 and HPFS. Because Microsoft disagreed with IBM on many important issues, they eventually separated; OS/2 remained an IBM project and Microsoft worked to develop Windows NT and NTFS.
The HPFS file system for OS/2 contained several important new features. When Microsoft created their new operating system, they borrowed many of these concepts for NTFS. The original NTFS developers were Tom Miller, Gary Kimura, Brian Andrew, and David Goebel.
Probably as a result of this common ancestry, HPFS and NTFS use the same disk partition identification type code (07). Using the same Partition ID Record Number is highly unusual, since there were dozens of unused code numbers available, and other major file systems have their own codes. For example, FAT has more than nine (one each for FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, etc.). Algorithms identifying the file system in a partition type 07 must perform additional checks to distinguish between HPFS and NTFS.
Versions
Microsoft has released five versions of NTFS:
The NTFS.sys version number (e.g.
The public source identifies “NTFS” as proprietary file system developed by Microsoft. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around NTFS, proprietary and file.
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This entry incorporates text from “NTFS” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.