QUESTION :
Due to a failure of a partition managing software, I had to recover the files from my local hard drive with TestDisk on a live Ubuntu drive.
Afterwards, I encountered several files named :ms-properties. They only occur in the parent folder of my SkyDrive location and in the SkyDrive subfolders. Additionally, for every file or folder, there exists a corresponding :ms-properties file.
Note: I can only see these files under Linux. They disappear when using Windows.
Screenshots
They do not have a file extension.
System info
- Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
- The location of the SkyDrive folder is on a NTFS-formatted partition
Does anyone know this type of file? I’ve found nothing while searching via Google.
I thought of alternate data streams, could these files be such data streams which got extracted by TestDisk?
ANSWER :
Each of those is an alternate data stream (ADS), which, in general, is arbitrary extra data programs (or the OS) associates with a file in an NTFS file system. SkyDrive (now OneDrive) apparently uses an ADS called :ms-properties to store some sort of meta-data it uses about the file. See Brian’s first comment on this thread. In a data recovery scenario, it sounds like those aren’t useful because you can just drop the recovered files back into OneDrive on your new environment.