i have a friend that is pull millions of pages from eBay and several time the master table has become damaged even with 8 hard drives running to reduce the load (NOT RAID) so yes it would be good if you could backup and restore this table as running chkdsk /f takes ages and then you end up copying millions of files back from the backup server and the process take a day for 200GB of data.

The cluster, that lies directly in the center of the partition is the mirror cluster. This mirror placement is used almost one hundred percent of the time. The mirrored data is only what can fit in one cluster, which is four records. The most important information in this mirror is the first record. The first record is the MFT pointer, that tells the file system where the entire MFT is stored. In other words, the first record of the Master File Table tells us which clusters are used in order to store the Master File Table.

Many times I have seen the first record of the MFT destroyed, and in doing so making the entire file system unreadable. I always thought this was a weakness of the file system. Microsoft tries to overcome this by storing a copy of the first record in the center of the drive.

Linux does something similar in as much as you have a super block saved several times in EXTFS, XFS, etc file systems. You just never know where a bad sector might pop-up.

So, to answer your question, there is not a full copy of the Master File Table on the partition, but there is a backup of the first record to the MFT.

I hope this answers your question.

This is an interesting article and well put for those who don’t understand the many technical names attributed to what makes a computer, a computer.

While I have been reading about the MTF, from various resources, I have seen mentioned the MTF Mirror.

Is it possible to access this for copying and backup without touching the main MTF and how would you suggest doing this?