Home

NTFSaware

NTFSaware is a software concept and ecosystem intended to provide deep NTFS file system awareness to software developers and administrative tools. The objective is to expose NTFS structures and semantics—such as the Master File Table (MFT), file metadata and attributes, security descriptors, access control lists, hard links, reparse points, alternate data streams, sparse and compressed data, and the USN Change Journal—to user-space applications through well-defined interfaces. By doing so, NTFSaware aims to improve data recovery, digital forensics, cross-platform tooling, and advanced file-system analytics.

The architecture often envisioned for NTFSaware includes a parser and validator for NTFS on-disk structures, an

In practice, NTFSaware is described in some discussions and prototypes rather than as a widely deployed product.

in-memory
cache
of
metadata,
a
cross-platform
API,
and
optional
components
that
can
run
as
a
user-space
layer
(for
example
via
a
FUSE-based
file
system)
or
as
a
kernel-
or
driver-level
shim
on
Windows.
The
project
emphasizes
safety,
with
read-only
modes
by
default
and
explicit
write-enabled
modes
under
strict
control.
Related
efforts
exist
in
the
broader
space
of
NTFS
tooling,
forensics
suites,
and
cross-platform
file-system
interfaces.
The
concept
remains
of
interest
to
researchers
and
tool
developers
dealing
with
NTFS
data
management,
recovery,
and
analysis.