Is it safe to scan a live disk? about ntfs HOT 2 CLOSED

I looked at the code but couldn't judge how safe is it to read directory entry tables directly with this on a live system? I mean, how safe is it to scan a whole disk lets say 5-10 tb while it is being heavily written, with potentially some deletes happening? Can you be reading a folder and it be deleted while reading contents or lets say a file in the folder is deleted?

My current ntfs crate is read-only and doesn't modify the filesystem at all. As a result, it cannot impact the consistency of your filesystem if you use it to read a filesystem that is also being modified right now.

As for crash safety, the crate may return an NtfsError whenever it hits an inconsistent filesystem state. For example, this may be the case when the operating system's filesystem driver concurrently writes to it or when a structure that you are operating on has just been deleted. However, the crate should never crash on invalid data. Special emphasis on this has been put in the recent releases.

Considering how NTFS works, you should be able to access some deleted files and folders using my crate (if you know their file record numbers or simply try out numbers). While the pointers to these files/folders may have been overwritten on disk, the underlying structures are often still intact.

Anyway, if you plan to scan filesystems in the terabyte range, please note that the current version of my crate has not been optimized for performance at all. Your scan may be very slow.

Hope this helps.

from ntfs.

Also If I get around to it would anyone be interested in the code?

from ntfs.