Most users seem to care deeply about "things just work". Here is why
ntfs-3g also took the online fsck path some time ago.
NTFS support had a highly bad reputation on Linux thus the new code was
written with rigid sanity checks and extensive automatic, regression
testing. One of the consequences is that we're detecting way too many
inconsistencies left behind by the Windows and other NTFS drivers,
hardware faults, device drivers.
To better utilize the non-existing developer resources, it was obvious to
suggest the already existing Windows fsck (chkdsk) in such cases. Simple
and safe as most people like us would think who never used Windows.
However years of experience shows that depending on several factors chkdsk
may start or not, may report the real problems or not, but on the other
hand it may report bogus issues, it may run long or just forever, and it
may even remove completely valid files. So one could perhaps even consider
suggestions to run chkdsk a call to play Russian roulette.
Thankfully NTFS has some level of metadata redundancy with signatures and
weak "checksums" which make possible to correct some common and obvious
corruptions on the fly.
Similarly to ZFS, Windows Server 2008 also has self-healing NTFS:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/6f883d0d-3668-4e15-b7ad-4df...
Szaka
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NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org
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