[ntfs-3g-news] Stable NTFS-3G 2009.2.1 released

[Szabolcs S. <sz...@nt...>]

Welcome,

  *  Stable release: better availability, more features, fixes
  *  Initial online recovery support
  *  Improved extended attribute support
  *  Fixed a rare driver crash
  *  Major enhancements on Mac OS X
  *  Download, acknowledgements

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The hardware disk space keep growing. If there are major file system 
inconsistencies then offline check and recovery is needed. This may not 
be possible for embedded computers, or when Windows is not available or 
bootable, or it may require a very long time meanwhile users can not 
even access any of their healthy data. 

The solution is online recovery. In this case file system damages are 
repaired on-the-fly by the file system driver. Online file system recovery 
is an increasingly popular trend in modern file systems.

Historically NTFS-3G had very rigid sanity checks and this won't change 
in the future either. Thankfully NTFS was designed with robustness in 
mind and many of the critical file system metadata are stored redundantly, 
helping recovery.

NTFS-3G already did minor recovery and repair in the past. The new stable 
release officially introduced the 'recover' and 'norecover' mount options. 
The former option will cause the driver to recover and repair a corrupted 
or inconsistent NTFS volume if it's possible. We will keep improving this 
feature in the future. The default behaviour is 'recover'.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The user namespace extended attributes are supported from now by default 
on Linux. The other namespaces like system, security, and trusted, are 
supported by the Advanced NTFS-3G driver. Please see more at

    http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/advanced-ntfs-3g.html
and
    http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/extend-attr.html

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The driver may crashed when it tried to read a highly fragmented file 
or directory which was either corrupted or it was unreadable due to a 
hardware error. This has been fixed. Upgrade is recommended.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X also introduced new features in the latest releases.
These include:

 - NTFS-3G Preference Pane. Screenshot:
   http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/ntfs-3g/prefpanescreen.png

 - Filename normalization to increase compatibility with Windows 
   filenames and Apple's Finder.

 - The occasional empty directory list problem is solved.

 - Advisory locking is used, trying to prevent concurrent accesses
   by virtual machines (e.g. Parallels, VMware, VirtualBox).

 - A new dialog which assists mounting the NTFS volumes.

Please see more details about NTFS-3G for Mac OS X at

    http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The source code of the latest stable driver is available at 

    http://ntfs-3g.org/

Many thanks to: Jean-Pierre Andre, Erik Larsson, Dominique L Bouix, 
Miklos Szeredi, Csaba Henk, Alejandro Pulver, Amit Singh, Chris Coulson,
Andreas Gruenbacher, Alan Bateman, Joseph Garvin, Max Khon, Greg Banks ...

	The NTFS-3G Team