>What's the downside of just reading the MFT? Why doesn't Microsoft do it in file explorer, and why wouldn't every tool use it instead of walking through the fi

>What's the downside of just reading the MFT? Why doesn't Microsoft do it in file explorer, and why wouldn't every tool use it instead of walking through the file system? One disadvantage is that you can't read the MFT of network shares or device emulators presenting "virtual drive letters" to the OS. The typical (and slower) Win32 API functions FindFirstFile()/FindNextFile() used to iterate through the files structure work at a higher level of abstraction so they work on more targets that don't have an NTFS MFT. Indeed, if you point WizTree to a SMB network share, it will be a lot slower because it can't directly read the MFT. It's conceivable that Microsoft developers could have programmed Windows Explorer differently to have an optimized code path of reading MFT for local disks and then fall back to slower FindFirstFile()/FindNextFile() for non-MFT disks. Maybe that adds too much complexity and weird bugs. I notice that most of the 3rd-party "Win Explorer replacement" utilities also don't read MFT.