Dump List of NTFS Alternate Streams in Current Directory with AltStreamDump

NTFS (New Technology File System) is the much improvised way of storing and retrieving Files from the hard disk used by the Windows NT Operating System. When compared to the older File Systems like FAT, NTFS employs much advanced data structure in order to improve performance, reliability, disk space utilization along with better security features.

NTFS Alternate Streams or named streams or ADS (Alternate Data Streams) is one of the useful features of NTFS system. Though Alternate streams part of the NTFS cannot be used to store critical data or information, still it can be widely used to store some non-critical data like thumbnails for image files, spell check and formatting data for documents etc., A directory can also contain alternate streams that can be accessed exactly the same way as the file streams.

Dump List of NTFS Alternate Streams in Current Directory with AltStreamDump

If you are looking for a tool to scan the folders and directories for NTFS Alternate streams and dump them on to the console window, you can use AltStreamDump tool from Nirsoft.

* AltStreamDump a Free utility and is a simple console application that dumps the list of NTFS alternate streams found in the current directory.
* By using few more command line options, you can use the AltStreamDump to display the alternate streams list of folders and sub-folders in the desired folder depth.
* This utility works on any version of Windows starting from Windows 2000 up to Windows 7

No installation required to use this tool. No additional DLL needed too.

* By default, AltStreamDum displays the alternate streams list for the current directory.
o View the alternate streams of other folders using –f and –d command line options like shown in the below table and example.

-h Displays command-line help.
-f [Folder Path] Specifies the folder that you wish to scan
-d [Subfolders Depth] Specified the depth of subfolders to scan. (0 = none, 1 = first level of subfolders, and so on)

Example:
AltStreamDump.exe -f “c:\myfolder” -d 3

Download AltStreamDump by clicking here.