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NTFS Reliability Features and System Management

One of the biggest problems with the FAT file system is that it includes virtually no built-in reliability features. Anyone who has used FAT has likely experienced file system problems that have occurred as a result of the system crashing, or even operating system or application errors. While these problems can be corrected, they often result in a loss of data. In a business or high-performance computing environment, having the file system become corrupted on a regular basis is simply not acceptable. One of the most important design goals of NTFS was to make the file system more reliable. While reliability features may not be very exciting, they are of paramount importance to many NTFS users.

In this section I take a fairly comprehensive look at NTFS's key reliability and system management characteristics. I begin with a discussion of NTFS's recoverable file system features, including how its transaction-based system operates, and how it uses transaction logging to recover the file system if that becomes necessary. I then describe the change journal feature of NTFS. From there, I move on to talk about error correction and fault tolerance features, and finally, I talk a bit about fragmentation and defragmentation under NTFS.

Next: Transactional Operation

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