History of NTFS filesystem

NTFS is an abbreviation of New Technology File System. This filesystem was developed by Microsoft to meet requirements of business applications and introduced in July 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. It was a bit slower compared to wide spread FAT filesystem in this times but it was used some of UNIX principles of reliability, sharing and security and that was more important to corporation users. NTFS filesystem was introduced as an important part of Windows NT's security and reliability.

As the software development company that specializes in data recovery software we can confirm that NTFS is really much better compared to FAT filesystem. The chance of getting your data back is far higher from NTFS disk rather than from FAT filesystem.

But security and reliability was not so important for home users, since the performance was dramatic compared to FAT filesystem. The most advanced features was also neglected by home users: of course, who needs logical disk more then 32 Gb? In 1993 it was a HUGE amount of data. Quite large HDD was about 1 Gb total. There was also nobody who needed to create files more then 4 Gb. It is normal nowadays to create backup images of DVDs and the "Blue Ray disks" already comes with 27 Gb of data. These factors force Microsoft to develop and maintain 2 completely different operation systems: Windows 9x and Windows NT families.

This state of affairs was until in 2000 Microsoft released new version of Windows NT family - Windows 2000. It was robust as previous NT's and was almost as simple and useful as Windows 9x family was. The HDD's were larger, and the people also wanted more from OS at all and filesystem in particular.

The important thing we should mention is that Windows 9x was able to use only FAT filesystem and Windows NT and Windows 2000 was able to work with both.

In 2003 Microsoft was released Windows XP and completely eliminated Windows 9x family. This also means the domination NTFS filesystem over FAT. Hurrah! Now our data is much more secure then before!

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