NTFS

New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded (FAT) as the preferred filesystem on Windows and is supported in Linux and BSD as well. NTFS reading and writing support is provided using a free and open-source kernel implementation known as NTFS3 in Linux and the NTFS-3G driver in BSD. By using the convert command, Windows can convert FAT32/16/12 into NTFS without the need to rewrite all files. NTFS uses several files typically hidden from the user to store metadata about other files stored on the drive which can help improve speed and performance when reading data. Unlike FAT and (HPFS), NTFS supports access control lists (ACLs), filesystem encryption, transparent compression, s and . NTFS also supports shadow copy to allow backups of a system while it is running, but the functionality of the shadow copies varies between different versions of Windows. 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 . 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 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.