Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#21

Post by babypuncher »

naikrovek wrote: post #16
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

NTFS has gained support for a few features over the years, but it wasn't meant to evolve, much. Microsoft knew what they wanted from the filesystem and they wrote it to spec very early in its life. ReFS on Windows is where the changes are coming to. finally a 1st party filesystem which supports Copy on Write file cloning. a lot of core features of NTFS aren't supported on ReFS, so it's clearly not intended to be a re…

Windows recently got support for booting from ReFS volumes, so it seems like Microsoft has started working on it again and maybe does think a move away from NTFS is possible in the future.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#22

Post by loeg »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #20
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) This sounds like evolution of options more than evolution of existing file systems Is ext4 still not most popular for most end users? Curious how much ext4 has changed vs NTFS past... ~20 years (ext4 went stable 2008 apparently)

ext4 remains the default for a lot of distros and probably most end users, but other options are common as well. openSUSE and Fedora now default to btrfs, RHEL defaults to XFS.

XFS also has not changed much in the past 10-20 years :-).

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#23

Post by distract8901 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

> Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) This sounds like evolution of options more than evolution of existing file systems Is ext4 still not most popular for most end users? Curious how much ext4 has changed vs NTFS past... ~20 years (ext4 went stable 2008 apparently)

My bet is that btrfs will replace ext4 in the nearish future. It's the default for Arch, which also comes default with filesystem snapshots before any system updates.

It's pretty nice. I think it also supports some flavor of volumes or virtual partitions, but I don't have any real use for that kind of thing.

The snapshots are really good though. Very fast and don't take up a ton of space, somehow.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#24

Post by rerdavies »

naikrovek wrote: post #15
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've had the new linux NTFS driver corrupt files more than once. In fact, it just corrupted the partition table of my external backup drive this year. Which was last time I trusted it for anything but read-only mounting.

I've used it extensively on multiple machines and have had no problems. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Why is this even an answer? ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#25

Post by amno »

naikrovek wrote: post #15
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I've had the new linux NTFS driver corrupt files more than once. In fact, it just corrupted the partition table of my external backup drive this year. Which was last time I trusted it for anything but read-only mounting.

I've used it extensively on multiple machines and have had no problems. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

It have corrupted my drive several times.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#26

Post by pengaru »

msla wrote: post #5
nfriedly wrote: post #4

Looks like it's read-only at the moment, but still pretty cool. It's dual-licensed as MIT or Apache 2.0, so it ought to be usable just about anywhere.

> Looks like it's read-only at the moment, but still pretty cool. That's how Linux NTFS support started out, too. What is it about NTFS that makes writing hugely more difficult than reading?

Reading is always easier to implement than writing. Only writing has the potential to actively corrupt the filesystem or leave it in some inconsistent state.

Generally, the more modern the filesystem, the more complicated writing becomes.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#27

Post by gregschlom »

adzm wrote: post #3

This is pretty great. I've been wanting to make a simple utility that can scan an NTFS drive for a filename pattern; scanning the MFT is incredibly fast versus using the actual filesystem API calls to do so.

Sounds exactly like Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/) - do check it out if you're not aware of this tool.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#28

Post by toyg »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

> Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) This sounds like evolution of options more than evolution of existing file systems Is ext4 still not most popular for most end users? Curious how much ext4 has changed vs NTFS past... ~20 years (ext4 went stable 2008 apparently)

Btrfs seems to be the new standard, it might well end up being the one big thing Oracle did for Linux; it definitely evolved significantly over the last 15 years.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#29

Post by kcb »

distract8901 wrote: post #23
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) This sounds like evolution of options more than evolution of existing file systems Is ext4 still not most popular for most end users? Curious how much ext4 has changed vs NTFS past... ~20 years (ext4 went stable 2008 apparently)

My bet is that btrfs will replace ext4 in the nearish future. It's the default for Arch, which also comes default with filesystem snapshots before any system updates. It's pretty nice. I think it also supports some flavor of volumes or virtual partitions, but I don't have any real use for that kind of thing. The snapshots are really good though. Very fast and don't take up a ton of space, somehow.

Never using btrfs no matter how default it comes. Only filesystem I've had data loss with, 2 district occasions.

Re: An implementation of the NTFS filesystem in a Rust crate

#30

Post by denkmoon »

mc32 wrote: post #17
andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #10

Question for the experts! Has NTFS changed much in... 20 years? Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...) Apple replaced one filesystem with another in just the past few years, with apparently some very advanced new features. But NTFS is just... NTFS? Does NTFS today look anything like how it looked in…

There’s ReFS for windows. Don’t forget Apple was stuck with one barely functioning FS (HFS+) for decades.

Is ReFS real? Like does anyone really use it outside of Microsoft's labs?
Post reply on HN