As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install 👍
…and Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System!
As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install 👍
…and Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System!
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they’ve been gunshy ever since.
You don’t sound like you weren’t around the Windows Vista/Longhorn development days when they promised a successor to NTFS and then over the course of the next couple of years, would bail on that (and nearly every other promise made).
WinFS: https://www.zdnet.com/article/bill-gates-biggest-microsoft-product-regret-winfs/
And FWIW, they are developing ReFS, which looks like it will finally supplant NTFS, but given MS’ business model, don’t expect NTFS to ever really disappear.
Yeah, I definitely was. I think that gave them PTSD or something because they haven’t even tried to make moderate changes to NTFS since. And besides ReFS which I hadn’t heard about until this thread, they haven’t even done something as minor as give you an option to use different file systems like ext4.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn’t great, it isn’t terrible, it’s functional. I don’t really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
Honest answer: it’s fragile. There are many cases of media durability being an issue and there will be going into the future. Adding a layer of ecc in the fs goes a long way.
WinFS wasn’t a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn’t a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.