Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2007 / ia / Paper 5 / 8 / e / Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
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NTFS offers several capabilities absent from FAT32. Four relevant advantages are per-file security, recoverable metadata updates, larger files and transparent compression. In detail, access control lists and ownership allow different users to have different rights on individual objects; file-system journaling helps recover a consistent metadata structure after a crash; file sizes can exceed FAT32's limit of bytes per file; and built-in compression can reduce the storage needed without changing application file access.
Encryption, quotas and sparse-file support are additional examples, but are not needed for the four requested points. Metadata journaling is not the same as guaranteeing that every recent data write survives a failure, and superiority in these capabilities does not mean universal superiority in compatibility or simplicity. The supported features are compared in the filesystem functionality documentation.
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