I wonder what kind of reliability guarantees NTFS provides about the data stored on it? For example, suppose I'm opening a file, appending to the end, then closing it, and the power goes out at a random time during this operation. Could I find the file completely corrupted?
I'm asking because I just had a system lock-up and found two of the files that were being appended to completely zeroed out. That is, of the right size, but made entirely of the zero byte. I thought this isn't supposed to happen on NTFS, even when things fail.
NTFS is a transactional file system, so it guarantees integrity - but only for the metadata (MFT), not the (file) content.