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Rakesh Pandit edited this page Aug 23, 2021 · 23 revisions

NTFS-3G

The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, NetBSD, OpenIndiana, QNX and Haiku. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 NTFS file systems.

The purpose of the project is to develop, quality assurance and support a trustable, featureful and high performance solution for hardware platforms and operating systems whose users need to reliably interoperate with NTFS. Besides this practical goal, the project also aims to explore the limits of the hybrid, kernel/user space filesystem driver approach, performance, reliability and feature richness per invested effort wise.

Besides the common file system features as defined by POSIX, NTFS-3G provides specific support for interoperability with Windows, thus facilitating data sharing with applications running on Windows.

Features

  • File ownership and permissions : the ownership and permissions of files, implemented according to POSIX rules, are interoperable with Windows.
  • POSIX ACLs : the ACLs, are an extension to ownership and permissions, as defined in a POSIX draft.
  • Junction points : the junction points and symbolic links created by Windows are seen as symbolic links.
  • Access to NTFS Internal data : a few useful internal data are mapped to extended attributes for easier access.
  • Compression : creating and updating compressed files are supported.
  • Access to plugins for processing special file formats, such as the system compression of Windows 10.
  • Plugin for reading the deduplicated files stored by Windows servers.
  • Tools for managing ownership, permissions and ACLs : ntfssecaudit checks the integrity of ownership, permissions and ACL, ntfsusermap gives help to configure ownership.
  • Applying unfinished metadata updates by ntfsrecover when a device was unsafely unplugged from Windows.

A general presentation of NTFS, NTFS-3G and Tuxera NTFS was made at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference at Grenoble, France, on Oct 16, 2009. This presentation is available here.

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