File System

FileIOTest is a command line tool that tests the speed of local or remote (SMB) storage by performing some common file IO operations repeatedly and measuring the duration. These are the main facts:

As I found out the (excellent) Egnyte Desktop Sync client for Windows ignores directories that have the system attribute set. For some reason some of the directories I wanted to sync did have this attribute set. Getting rid of the system attribute on (many) directories is harder than it seems.

This is a complete listing of all Windows 7 file system permissions. The list was generated on a 32-bit installation with SetACL. More default permission listings can be found here.

The introduction of a new file system is a big step even for Microsoft. According to this article in the Building Windows 8 blog ReFS will ship with the server version of Windows 8 only, but will be brought to the client at a later time, too. ReFS was built for resiliency and complements Storage Spaces. This post summarizes the main facts from the announcement.

When it comes to copying files, Windows Explorer may probably be called reliable, but fast it is not. After the rewrite of the copy routines in Vista had caused much customer dissatisfaction, Microsoft rewrote the copy dialog again for Windows 7. But still, especially copying many small files takes ages.

When dealing with Windows NTFS file system permissions, one quickly encounters the SYNCHRONIZE access right, the purpose of which may not be obvious. SYNCHRONIZE belongs to the standard access rights, just like DELETE, READ_CONTROL, WRITE_DAC and WRITE_OWNER.

Sometimes you need a list of all the files and/or folders in a directory with their full path, without any additional information. “DIR /B” would be the right command, if it only printed out the full path (it does that only if combined with the recursion parameter /S).

It is a common practice amongst administrators to disable the creation of short filenames on NTFS. I freely admit to have recommended this in the past. Was I wrong? Background

This is the seventh part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that mixed 32-/64-bit processes are not allowed and how that rule affects both administrators and script-writers. In this context I mentioned the strangely named directory SysWOW64. Today I am going to explain what it is used for by starting with redirection.