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~~CLOUD:30~~

The most frequently asked question about this project is “How long until there is full read/write support?”. This page should give you a feeling about the answer. If you do not know the difference between kernel driver and ntfsprogs, look at page 'How can I access NTFS?' first.

The second most frequently asked question (including its variants) is quite related: “Why is it taking so long?”. We have a page 'Why is it taking so long' with the answer.

You may want to look at the kernel driver roadmap for more details. Lots of things have already been implemented, here are the most important:

• Fully stable read support.
• Reading and writing files. (try to avoid the common text editor pitfall)
• Shrinking and enlarging files. (Linux 2.6.16+)
• Resetting the logfile on mount. (so that Windows will be forced to run chkdsk if Linux will not unmount cleanly)
• Stamping $usnjrnl. (Same thing as the logfile resetting)

Lots of things have already been implemented, here are the most important:

• Create/Delete/Move files and directories.
• Hard link files.
• Read and write to normal and sparse files.
• Read compressed and encrypted files.
• Access to special Interix files (symlinks, devices, FIFOs).
• List/Read/Write/Add/Remove named data streams.
• Supported on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Mac OSX.

• Reading and writing with changes to the file size. (ntfscp, ntfscat, ntfsls, ntfstruncate)
• File and directory creation/deletion. (ntfsmount, ntfscp)
• Creation of NTFS version 1.2 and 3.1 filesystems. (mkntfs)
• Volume resizing, cloning, backup, restore, rescue, compare. (ntfsresize, ntfsclone, ntfscmp)
• Mounting volume from userspace. (ntfsmount)
• Getting info about various aspects of the filesystem. (ntfsinfo, ntfscluster, ntfsdump_logfile)
• Some kinds of low level manipulations. (ntfswipe, ntfslabel, ntfsfix, ntfsundelete)
• Accessing to encrypted files. (ntfsmount, ntfsdecrypt)
• A library to allow other GPLed programs to enjoy such functionality. (libntfs)

• Directory operations (create, remove, rename)

Note: The above features are complete and mostly stable in Anton's private tree. However, these features are not expected to be merged into the Linux kernel before spring 2008 for various (good) reasons. No need to ask, the won't go public before spring 2008.

• fsck for NTFS. (ntfsck)

• Writing to compressed/encrypted files.
• Permissions and ownership support.
• Basic test suite
• defragging. (ntfsdefrag)
• Maybe even visual inspection (and altering) the disk structures. (ntfsdiskedit)
• All the rest.