NTFS

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of Windows NT family.

NTFS has several technical improvements over FAT and HPFS (High Performance File System), the file systems that it superseded, such as improved support for metadata, and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus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.

History

In the mid-1980s, Microsoft and IBM formed a joint project to create the next generation of graphical operating system. The result of the project was OS/2, but Microsoft and IBM disagreed on many important issues and eventually separated: OS/2 remained an IBM project and Microsoft worked on Windows NT.

The OS/2 file system HPFS contained several important new features. When Microsoft created their new operating system, they borrowed many of these concepts for NTFS. Probably as a result of this common ancestry, HPFS and NTFS use the same disk partition identification type code (07).

Transactional NTFS

Transactional NTFS (abbreviated TxF) is a component introduced in Windows Vista and present in later versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system that brings the concept of atomic transactions to the NTFS file system, allowing Windows application developers to write file output routines that are guaranteed to either succeed completely or to fail completely. Transactional NTFS is also known informally as NTFS 6.0, because it was introduced with Windows Vista, which has internal Windows version designation NT 6.0.

Major operating system components, including System Restore, Task Scheduler, and Windows Update, rely on TxF for stability.

Due to its complexity and various nuances which developers need to consider as part of application development, Microsoft has considered deprecating TxF APIs in a future version of Windows. Microsoft has strongly recommended that developers investigate using the alternatives rather than adopting the Transactional NTFS API platform which may not be available in future versions of Windows.