We are happy to announce the next stable release of NTFS-3G and ntfsprogs.

The source code is available at

git clone git://ntfs-3g.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ntfs-3g/ntfs-3g

The package contains the following improvements, changes and fixes:

• ntfs-3g: fixed device path canonicalization for use by devmapper
• ntfs-3g: fixed setting DOS names when defined with lower-case chars
• ntfs-3g: fixed attribute flags controlling recursive writes
• ntfs-3g: fixed compilation on OpenIndiana
• ntfs-3g: fixed options parsing on OSes with no extended attributes
• ntfs-3g: fixed relatime as a default mount option
• ntfs-3g: fixed endless recursion when MFT extents are described by themselves
• ntfs-3g: fixed the description of inherit option
• ntfs-3g: fixed overwriting a truncated file
• ntfs-3g: fixed truncation of DOS file names (12 ntfschars, not 12 utf8 chars)
• ntfs-3g: fixed the setting of attributes by secaudit (index not synced)
• ntfs-3g: faster compression
• ntfs-3g: new option delay_mtime to delay updates of mtime+ctime
• ntfsfix: new option -d to clear the dirty flag if fix is successful
• ntfsfix: fixed volume dirty flag test
• ntfsfix: new option to clear the list of bad sectors
• ntfsfix: fixed compilation on Sparc
• ntfsfix: fixed a bug causing a segmentation violation
• ntfsfix: repair self-located MFT data bug
• ntfscp: fix free space calculation
• ntfscp: support compression
• ntfsresize: implemented expanding runlists
• ntfsresize: updated the description of the -f option
• ntfsresize: expand an NTFS volume downwards
• ntfsclone: backup bootsector not be to accounted for
• ntfsclone: creating/restoring a metadata image
• ntfsundelete: try to recover the file name when undeleting
• ntfsundelete: use inode number to name unnamed files
• ntfswipe: Big endian and other fixes
• secaudit: prefixed owner and group SID in ACL display
• library: fixed big cluster support using 4kB sector disk
• library: fixed huge data writes
• library: use transparent compression by default
• library: fixed several bad returns in error conditions
• library: enabled getting the sector size on FreeBSD and MacOSX
• build: fixed “make libs” to only build libraries

The stable release is available at

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

Many thanks to Jean-Pierre Andre, Erik Larsson and many other contributors!

Tuxera Open Source Team

MCL Distribution Pte Ltd., Tuxera’s authorized distributor in Singapore will show the product. In the booth you will be able to see how Tuxera NTFS for Mac works in Mac OS X Lion.

To find us:
SUNTEC Singapore
Hall 6, Booth 6558
Opening Hours : 12 noon to 9pm
Free Admission

Welcome to COMEX 2011!

For general information about Tuxera NTFS for Mac, please write us to macsales@tuxera.com or visit: www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac
For sales information in Singapore, please contact MCL Distribution Pte Ltd: sales@mcldisti.com

Apple® today announced that in just one day, over one million users bought and downloaded Mac OS® X Lion, the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system… users are buying Lion faster than any other OS release in Apple’s history.

Now that’s just huge!

While the popularity of Mac is skyrocketing to new records, we’re also seeing more and more people using multiple operating systems and not just one. Windows is not disappearing any time soon and remains the number one choice in many homes and workplaces alike. This means that Macs also need full, rock solid Windows interoperability. Many of those new to Mac bring with them Microsoft Windows formatted hard drives and may continue to use Windows still on the side. And the chances are high that as a Mac user you will need to exchange large amounts of data with friends and colleagues who stay on Windows.

This is where Tuxera NTFS for Mac comes to help. With complete support to OS X Lion, Tuxera NTFS for Mac adds full read and write compatibility with all Windows-formatted drives.

We are very proud to have been flooded by positive feedback on how Tuxera NTFS for Mac is working now smoothly on Mac OS X Lion. Thank you to every one of you!

For those of you who haven’t yet upgraded your system, we urge you to download and install the latest stable version 2011.4.1 which was released already on June 20th.

Last but not least I’d like to remind that once you buy a Tuxera NTFS for Mac license you will get future releases free of charge.

The new release contains numerous enhancements. Here are some of the highlights:

• Automatic translation of filenames that would be invalid in Windows into a compatible form, leading to less problems when copying files to NTFS volumes (can be turned off in preferences).
• Improved responsiveness when using multiple simultaneous NTFS volumes on 64-bit kernels.
• The ability to turn off native storage of extended attributes, introduced in version 2010.7 (to improve compatibility with NTFS-3G and older versions of Mac OS X’s internal NTFS driver).
• Bugfix for formatting hard disks with 4 KiB sector size. The previous version produced NTFS volumes that could not be used successfully in Windows.
• Bugfixes/tuning of native extended attribute handling. Some applications (e.g. Adobe Photoshop) could misbehave with the previous stable version.
• Bugfix for saving files from Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Bugfix for free disk space handling. The amount of free disk space being displayed in Finder was not kept up-to-date in some situations.

Updates are free for all existing customers, so we urge everyone to update to the latest version.

Tuxera’s eCommerce provider Avangate just wrote an article about our partnership and their commitment to serve Tuxera’s customers better every day:
http://www.avangate.com/news/press/tuxera-avangate-client.html

Tuxera always receives customer’s experience and suggestions to continuously add new features and improvements for our product Tuxera NTFS for Mac. A new release is coming soon.

Tuxera is continuously looking for ideas to create new disk and file system utilities to satisfy your needs. If you have suggestions what kind of new features and utilities you would want to have, please do write us an email to: feedback AT tuxera DOT com.

Highlights:

• Automatic filename translation of characters that Windows Explorer considers illegal. File names and attribute names can now safely contain characters such as ‘:’ and ‘\’ as they are translated to the private Unicode range according to the scheme used in Services for Mac. (This proved to be an immediate problem as some Mac OS X component has started to set attributes like “com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms” which resulted in the files being inaccessible in Windows Explorer.)
• Improved performance with multiple filesystems under the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel.
• Bugfix: Free space updates was not picked up by Finder at all times (Snow Leopard).
• More efficient aligned I/O, now built into the caching layer. This should improve performance in some situations.
• Bugfix for resource fork handling. This bug resulted in problems with some applications, e.g. Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Please send an email to our dedicated support email address describing any issues that you might have. Thank you.

You can format external drives now exFAT under OS X. You may also notice Tuxera exFAT option — we have had our own implementation running on OS X for testing purposes some time already…

This is of course great news for Tuxera as the industry’s first and foremost exFAT provider. Default platform support from Microsoft and now also from Apple is going to further accelerate exFAT adoption. Tuxera has already worked hard to extend exFAT platform support beyond Tuxera exFAT for Android and Linux where we started from (see also our joint exFAT for Linux white paper with Microsoft). We recently published news how QNX chose Tuxera to implement exFAT on their operating system, which has been now delivered to the first customers. Latest to follow suit with Tuxera exFAT is Mentor Graphics on Nucleus and Android.

HELSINKI, FINLAND – October 11, 2010 – Tuxera Inc., the leading provider of Windows-compatible file systems for Linux, Android, Mac and other platforms, today announced the release of a major new version of its popular Tuxera NTFS for Mac loaded with full 64-bit support, extended attributes, and other improvements. Apple’s latest Mac Pro computers, released in mid-August, are the first to have Snow Leopard operating system installed in 64-bit kernel mode. Tuxera follows Apple’s direction with the revamped NTFS file system application that is guaranteed to work with future Macs.

Tuxera NTFS for Mac allows Apple Macintosh users to read and write in Windows-format, safely and quickly. The software has become extremely popular among consumers who migrate from Windows to Mac, and wish to fully use their Windows-formatted hard drives and memory sticks with the new system. Designers running Mac use the software to prepare customer deliveries. Tuxera NTFS for Mac is also widely used in media production companies and universities with heterogeneous computing environments that include both Windows and Mac computers. The software is compatible with popular virtualization and encryption solutions including Parallels Desktop®, VMware Fusion® and TrueCrypt.

“This is a major upgrade for Tuxera NTFS for Mac. We have worked hard to rebuild ‘under the hood’ functionality to be fully compatible with 64-bit and are pleased with the performance throughput,” stated Mikko Välimäki, Tuxera CEO. “There are also several other improvements ranging from a simpler installation process to new features only available from Tuxera such as full support for extended attributes. We remain fully committed to providing Mac users the best-of-class file system compatibility to the Windows world.”

Apple has introduced 64-bit kernel mode in Snow Leopard. 64-bit support speeds up the operating system and removes barriers for maximum physical memory. Tuxera NTFS for Mac now joins other system applications that can take full advantage of the future of high-performance computing.

The new Tuxera NTFS for Mac version 2010.10 can be downloaded from http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/. An update is free-of-charge to previously registered customers.

For more information, please contact:

Mikko Välimäki
CEO, Tuxera Inc.
+358 (0)50 598 0498

Apple: 64-bit.

About Tuxera. Tuxera is the leading provider of file systems that allow music, pictures, videos and other content to be ported across devices. With Tuxera file systems inside, users experience plug and play interoperability with their laptops, digital cameras, set-top-boxes, mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Building on the success of open source, Tuxera’s industry-standard NTFS and exFAT solutions for Linux, Android, Mac OS X and other platforms have over 30 million installations. Close collaboration with Microsoft ensures reliable compatibility and helps Tuxera to set the standard in high-performance, low power use for embedded and mobile solutions. Tuxera’s customers include leading hardware, software, and consumer electronics companies. For more information, please visit www.tuxera.com.

The new release candidate integrates the shared component MacFUSE closer into the driver to simplify installation and adds support for Mac users running the fully 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel (the ‘X86_64′ kernel flavor). This means that the newest Mac Pros (mid-2010) will be able to use Tuxera NTFS for Mac without switching to the 32/64-bit hybrid kernel which is the default on all other consumer Macs.

Along with these changes there have been numerous other improvements, for instance:

• Driver now runs in 64-bit mode on Intel 64-bit and PowerPC G5 processors (only Mac OS X 10.5 and later).
• Bugfix for extended attribute handling which caused file copying problems in some cases.
• Disabled the ‘archive’ flag for directories because of conflict with Finder.
• Fixed incompatibility with TrueCrypt volumes.
• Driver codebase synchronized with NTFS-3G 2010.8.8 (see: NTFS-3G release history for a list of changes).

Feedback from users running the 64-bit kernel is most appreciated. Please post your experiences in the forum, or send an email to our dedicated support email address if you’re a customer. Thank you.

This new version brings some important features for Tuxera’s commercial NTFS software for Mac OS X. Most importantly, extended attributes are now fully enabled and mapped to Alternate Data Streams if you are running Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.

Extended attributes is a way of appending more than one data stream to a file, and this mechanism is used in Mac OS X for various things such as Finder information, the legacy “resource forks”, quarantine flags and much more.

In previous versions of Tuxera NTFS for Mac, extended attributes were supported but only using a compatibility mechanism storing them inside files starting with ‘._’ (called AppleDouble files), just like it is done with FAT32 file systems. This means that all files that had extended attributes applied to them also had a supplementary file created in the same directory holding those attributes. This does not happen any more. Instead, extended attributes are stored as Alternate Data Streams in NTFS, and can be accessed from within Windows using standard methods. The extended attributes are fully compatible with Mac OS X’s own NTFS driver and Windows Server’s “Services for Macintosh” extension (now discontinued).

Along with these changes there have been numerous other fixes, for instance:

• Fix for a rare issue where Tuxera NTFS for Mac could ‘hijack’ the mounting of certain unformatted media.
• Storing the Mac OS X backup timestamp is now supported.
• Preference pane is partly rewritten to be more robust and to leave no zombie processes behind.

Also, Tuxera NTFS for Mac has been synchronized with NTFS-3G so that all features and fixes as of NTFS-3G 2010.5.22 are included in the new release of Tuxera NTFS for Mac (see release history).

Tip: To convert your existing extended attributes, stored in ‘._’ files, to the newer storage method there is a command line utility called ‘dot_clean‘ that is relatively easy to use. It is present in Mac OS X 10.5 and later. This is an example of how to use it:

dot_clean /Volumes/NTFSVolume

You must replace ‘/Volumes/NTFSVolume’ with the path to your NTFS volume. This command will scan through an entire hierarchy of directories for ‘._’ files and merge their content into proper extended attributes. For more information about dot_clean, please read the manpage (‘man dot_clean‘).

This time Tuxera has record number of software releases! The topics:

• Stable NTFS-3G 2010.5.22
• NTFS-3G 2010.6.31-RC Release Candidate
• NTFS-3G for Mac 2010.5.22
• Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.6-RC Release Candidate

The stable NTFS-3G 2010.5.22 release is a minor update which addresses creating the missing usermap and secaudit utilities.

The software is available at

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

The new NTFS-3G 2010.6.31-RC release candidate contains exciting, major improvements, and the below changes and fixes:

• New: Full, transparent, read-write compression support.
• New: Two new mount options: compression and nocompression (default).
• New: Introduced windows_names mount option to enforce only Windows names.
• Change: Re-enabled compression in root directory.
• Change: Reversed default for showing/hiding hidden files.
• Change: Redefined default user mapping.
• Change: Marked files whose name has a dot initial as “hidden” if option hide_dot_files is used.
• Change: Renamed option default_permissions to permissions.
• Fixed use of utimensat() with external fuse older than 2.8.
• Fixed a hang when reading a corrupt compressed file.
• Fixed a possible crash when creating a stream.
• Fixed all reported and found compressed write related bugs.

Download it from the below web page

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

The long awaited NTFS-3G for Mac 2010.5.22 is also here. Changes since the last release:

• Everything which is included in stable NTFS-3G 2010.5.22.
• Fix: NTFS-3G for Mac could “hijack” non-NTFS volumes in extremely rare cases, leaving them unmountable until NTFS-3g for Mac was disabled.
• Fix: The NTFS-3G for Mac preference pane will no longer leave zombie processes behind.

For more information please see

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/06/ntfs-3g-for-mac-os-x-2010522.html

The latest release candidate of Tuxera NTFS for Mac, our high-performance commercial NTFS driver is out as well.

Changes since Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.1:

• Extended attribute support. Tuxera NTFS for Mac now supports storing Mac streams such as Finder information and resource forks as extended attributes, translating to Alternate Data Streams in Windows terminology. This means that NTFS drives will no longer be littered with ‘._’ (AppleDouble) files. Services For Mac attributes are used for the special attributes ‘com.apple.FinderInfo’ and ‘com.apple.ResourceFork’.
• Support for storing the Mac OS backup timestamp.
• All new features, enhancements and fixes included in stable NTFS-3G for Mac 2010.5.22.

Please see more at

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

Enjoy!

Tuxera Open Source Team

Until Tuxera, the 4Gb file size limitation made it impossible to copy files over 4Gb to a FAT32 formatted drive, and NTFS formatted drives could only be read on Macs, writing to them was not possible. … that could be a real deal breaker for many editors on Macs. Tuxera changes all that, and creates a seamless method for delivering files on hard drives to your PC-based clients.

Earlier also MacObserver picked Tuxera as the NTFS solution for Mac.

As a final note, Softpedia gave us “100% CLEAN” award

Note: This release contains an important bugfix for the issue described in KB974729. All users are urged to update as soon as possible.

Changes since 2009.10:

• A fix for the issue described in KB974729, in which NTFS drives were rendered unmountable in Windows Vista and Windows 7 in rare cases after being used extensively with Tuxera NTFS for Mac or NTFS-3G. After this update, Tuxera NTFS for Mac will no longer trigger this condition.
  To fix existing drives, please install the hotfix provided by Microsoft and follow instructions.
  If you have been affected by this issue and need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact our premium support email address (see your activation email).
• Performance improvements: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes many of the improvements featured in Tuxera NTFS for Embedded systems, designed to further increase performance and reduce unnecessary driver workload, especially when working with many smaller files and traversing large directory hierarchies.
  For example, when crawling a test volume recursively, 2010.1 was nearly 40% faster than 2009.10 in our tests.
• Performance improvements: The caching layer has been improved with more efficient lookup, which means less CPU overhead, and measures have been taken to minimize the amount of excess data that is read when accessing files in a random fashion.
• Feature: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes a new preference pane option “Disable recovery dialog for hibernated volumes”, which makes the driver ignore NTFS volumes that contain a hibernated Windows session instead of showing a dialog asking the user whether it wants to purge the hibernated state or abort mounting.
• Bugfix: Fix for some users of Snow Leopard who had problems with formatting NTFS volumes (Tuxera NTFS was not displayed as a formatting option at all times).
• Fix: General usability improvements in the installer and preference pane.
• Fix: Minor fixes to improve compatibility with the built-in NTFS driver.
• Experimental: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now attempts to mount Windows LDM partitions by default. This will not work at all times, but one user did benefit from this change.

Changes since version “1.0-RC”:

• Preference pane internal classes were renamed to avoid a namespace collision with the NTFS-3G preference pane. If you had both NTFS-3G and Tuxera NTFS installed you could experience some strange behaviour in System Preferences.
• Version number scheme changed to year.month[.revision].

Tuxera NTFS for Mac licenses can be purchased from the Tuxera Online Shop. As a customer, you are entitled to free updates. Your product key will continue to function in updated versions of the driver.

We also have a dedicated customer support email address where you can reach us and get help with the product, or get feedback on any problems that you may have.

Technical briefing

We were asked for a technical write-up regarding the changes that have been made to the NTFS driver for Tuxera NTFS for Mac, so I’m going to make an attempt to describe what we have done.

The most important issue that we identified when studying how to build a commercial grade product from the existing NTFS-3G for Mac OS X product was that performance still wasn’t optimal. This has been a problem for NTFS-3G from day one, caused by inefficient kernel/userspace interfaces to the raw disk devices provided by the Mac OS X kernel. Even after applying relevant patches to supply a caching layer between the disk device and the file system driver, we never fully reached the performance level that we would have desired.

Also, the existing caching layer (originally from the FreeBSD port of NTFS-3G) introduced a new problem: written data could stay in memory for long periods of time without being flushed to disk. This means that if the Mac would run out of battery, encounter a system crash, or if someone would disconnect an external drive without unmounting it first, then the latest changes to the data on the NTFS drive would not have reached the disk. The result in this situation is that people would lose the latest data that was written to the NTFS volume. Volume inconsistencies needing to be fixed with ‘chkdsk’ in Windows would also be very likely.

Essentially with NTFS-3G, people were forced to choose between better performance (caching on) and keeping the data safe in the event of a system crash (caching off).

We eventually decided to write a new caching layer from scratch, partially to be able to experiment with performance and to squeeze the best performance out of the disk, but also to be able to incorporate smart cache flushing to ensure that data doesn’t stay in memory longer than it absolutely needs to.

This proved to be very successful. With the new caching layer we have in many cases recorded performance comparable to and in some cases even better than the built in HFS+ driver.

Additional improvements have been made. Some examples:

• Implemented support for the Mac OS X “Locked’ and “Hidden” features for files, mapped to their NTFS equivalents (readonly, hidden). This can be used to make files immutable by “locking” them, just like on HFS+ volumes.
• Adaptive file ownership: The files on an NTFS volume always appear to be owned by the user currently accessing it.
• Support for putting files in the ‘Trash’ bin (in NTFS-3G, you could only delete them directly).
• Some bug fixes that will eventually appear in NTFS-3G as well, for instance: Firefox wouldn’t save files on an NTFS volume, International (non-ASCII) volume names led to an error when mounting…

We have also reconstructed the preference pane, added help content, and in many other ways made sure to iron out the small quirks and irregularities encountered in NTFS-3G, to make sure that we deliver a polished, tested and well-functioning product for the commercial market.

After installation, Tuxera NTFS becomes visible in your System Preferences.

There are many options you can play with. See the manual for explanations.

This is a release candidate version and a major upgrade from our previous open source NTFS-3G for Mac. Performance has been significantly improved along with other enhancements. We are pretty sure this is the fastest read/write NTFS driver you can have for Mac. We have successfully tested it on Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. Please send us any issues you find and we will fix them before the final release is out and available for purchase.