Transactional NTFS (abbreviated TxF) is a component introduced in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and present in later versions of the

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

that brings the concept of

atomic transaction In database systems, atomicity (; from ) is one of the ACID (''Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability'') transaction properties. An atomic transaction is an ''indivisible'' and '' irreducible'' series of database operations such that eithe ...

s to the

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

file system, allowing Windows application developers to write file-output routines that are guaranteed to either succeed completely or to fail completely. Major operating system components, including

System Restore System Restore is a feature in Microsoft Windows that allows the user to revert their computer's state (including system files, installed applications, Windows Registry, and system settings) to that of a previous point in time, which can be used ...

, Task Scheduler, and

Windows Update Windows Update is a Microsoft service for the Windows 9x and Windows NT families of the Microsoft Windows operating system, which automates downloading and installing Microsoft Windows software updates over the Internet. The service delivers sof ...

, rely on TxF for stability. During the

development of Windows Vista Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development (music), the process by which thematic material is reshaped *Photographic development *Filmmaking#Development, Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting *Developm ...

, WinFS also relied on TxF for storing files. Due to its complexity and various nuances which developers need to consider as part of application development, Microsoft has deprecated TxF and stated that it may be removed in a future version of Windows. Microsoft has strongly recommended that developers investigate using the alternatives rather than adopting the Transactional NTFS API platform which may not be available in future versions of Windows.

Overview

Transactional NTFS allows for files and directories to be created, modified, renamed, and deleted atomically. Using transactions ensures correctness of operation; in a series of file operations (done as a transaction), the operation will be committed if all the operations succeed. In case of any failure, the entire operation will roll back and fail. Transactional NTFS is implemented on top of the Kernel Transaction Manager, which is a Windows kernel component introduced in Windows Vista that provides transactioning of objects in the kernel. The NTFS file system already supports journaling of low-level operations, such as writing a block of data. Transactional NTFS expands on this capability to include: * Atomic operations on a single file: A common example of this is saving a file from an application; if the application or machine were to crash while writing the file, then only part of the file could be written, possibly resulting in a corrupted file. This would be a very significant problem if a previous version of the file was being over-written, as data would likely be lost. * Atomic operations spanning multiple files: If an application needs to update several files at once with a set of changes, all the necessary file operations can be performed as a single transaction, preventing inconsistent updates in the event of a failure. * Atomic operations spanning multiple computers: Performing the same operation on multiple computers is a fairly common administrative task in a corporate network; Transactional NTFS integrates with the Distributed Transaction Coordinator to ensure that the change is successfully applied to all machines. With the exception of read operations, using Transactional NTFS for transactions on Encrypting File System files is not supported in Windows Vista until Service Pack 1 and

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

References

External links

Because We Can
a Microsoft developer blog that discusses TxF both conceptually and in code
Kernel Transaction Manager
documentation on the Microsoft Developer Network. {{Windows Components Transaction processing Windows components Windows Vista Microsoft application programming interfaces

Overview

See also

References

External links