XYplorer Beta Club

While XYplorer outperforms anything Windows has to offer in the ways of file system presentation, it comes up equally short in the area of ADS. Is ADS coverage being considered for a future XYplorer release? Or is this way out of scope of the intended file system coverage of XYplorer. If the latter, then what is a good tool for viewing and managing ADSs?

msalvatori wrote:While XYplorer outperforms anything Windows has to offer in the ways of file system presentation, it comes up equally short in the area of ADS. Is ADS coverage being considered for a future XYplorer release? Or is this way out of scope of the intended file system coverage of XYplorer. If the latter, then what is a good tool for viewing and managing ADSs?

ADS was being considered before, but I hear that Vista makes it extremely difficult to use it in a practical way (security issues).

There is a good tool: http://www.rekenwonder.com/streamexplorer.htm

Nice tool. Thank you for the reference. Just for the record, I have found that Ad-Aware 2007 is capable of sweeping ADS.

Other than that the "rekenwonder" link seems to point to a completely different site, is there any change in your views on ADS. Currently using Nirsoft's AlternateStreamView v1.55, but it would be nice if XY would also be able to view them, or at least show their presence.

Wow, reviving an 11 years old thread... The Dead Don't Die...

Well, I did not hear much of "Alternate Data Streams" in the recent years. My impression is that they are silently going away. So there are no plans to support them ATM.

The main problem with ADS is that they are very easily removed by the external software. I.e. you can use ADS for folders, but if you try to use them for files - they will be vanished very fast. Sublime Text will remove them; Atom will remove them; Photoshop will remove them; presumably, Word and Excel will remove them. They are completely useless for files. The way of how XYplorer handles file/folder metadata (i.e. labels and comments) - i.e. in the automatically updated database - is the main thing I like in it.

John_C wrote: ↑05 Jul 2019 18:10 The main problem with ADS is that they are very easily removed by the external software.

This happens if you create a new file with the contents of the old file, and than remove the old file (which removes the ADS attached to it)
Maybe the applications you mentioned do exactly that to implement a save-write, instead of directly overwriting the files original data.

I use ADS to (invisibly) save meta-data to files. XY-Scripting can access read/write/check existance of ADS via the common colon-syntax "filename.txt:ads-name". But you cannot list the ADS via Scripting, so you need to use fixed names for the ADS.

Additionally you can use AlternateStreamOverlay (http://www.benf.org/other/alternatestre ... index.html) to see if files have ADS attached.
It offers Icon-Overlay, entries in context-menu and a property-sheet handler.

On 64bit Windows, I cannot register the 32bit-dll, so the Icon-overlay is not shown in XY. But you can use XYs 64-context menu to check for ADS, and access property-window which then shows the property-sheet.

OMG I literally just stumbled on ADS, file Tags and Comments on NTFS files.

THIS IS A KILLER THING that I need like mad (for a global company I am advising on document management).

If anyone has any resources handy to point me to --- PLS do so.

If there should be a way to implement a robust comment/tag system STABLY and NATIVELY via ADS on a typical company file server would make me kinda rule the world

What's wrong with viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8587
? The basics how to read and write ADS are there, wrap your own script around
it if necessary...

STABLE? Relying on that is not what an admin should do...

Thanks very much. I'll freaking make sure to come back after reading your link (and this just found blog post)

Regards
David