NTFS

NTFS (New Technology File System) is Microsoft's proprietary filesystem for Windows NT and its descendants, including the current Windows 10. It succeeded the earlier filesystems of the FAT family.

A central component of it is the Master File Table (MFT).

One change from earlier Microsoft filesystems is that all timestamps are in the UTC time zone (roughly equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time) instead of in local time zones as was done earlier; this means that timestamps may sometimes get messed up in transfer of files between filesystems if the zones aren't properly converted (times near the changeover between standard and daylight time in a given zone are particularly vulnerable to error). Timestamps are saved based on an epoch of AD 1601; see Windows FILETIME for more information.

Links

 * Wikipedia article
 * Microsoft technical reference (for Windows Server 2003)
 * Microsoft reference for MFT
 * Format poster for MFT
 * Rescuing a broken NTFS filesystem