Now that we've gone a few practical things out of the way
with disk partitioning and file system creation,
we can talk about concepts for a bit.
Remember when we talked about how our OS handles files?
It actually manages the actual file data,
file metadata, and file systems.
We've already covered file systems.
In this video, we're going to cover the file data and file metadata.
When we talk about data,
we're referring to the actual contents of the file;
like a text document that we saved to our hard drives.
The file metadata includes everything else,
like the owner of the file, permissions,
size of the file, it's location on the hard drive, and so on.
Remember that the NTFS file system is the native file system format of windows.
So how exactly does NTFS store and represent
the files we're working with on our operating system?
NTF uses something called The Master File Table or MFT to keep everything straight.
Every file on a volume has at least one entry in the MFT,
including the MFT itself.
Usually, there's a one-to-one correspondence between files and MFT records.
But if a file has a whole lot of attributes,
there might be more than one record to represent it.
In this context, attributes are things like the name of a file,
it's creation time stamp,
whether or not a file is read-only,
whether or not the file is compressed,
the location of the data that the file contains,
and many other pieces of information.
When you create files on an NTFS file system,
entries get added to the MFT.
When files get deleted,
their entries in the MFT are marked as Free so they can get reused.
One important part of a file's entry in
the MFT is an identifier called the file record number.
This is the index of the files entry in the MFT.
A special type of file we should mention in Windows is called a shortcut.
A shortcut is just another file and another entry in the MFT.
But it has a reference to some destination,
so that when you open it up,
you can get taken to that destination.
You can create a shortcut by right-clicking on
the target file and selecting the Create Shortcut option.