I’ve blogged before about how the new integrity-checking filesystem in Windows, ReFS, doesn’t actually have integrity checking turned on by default. It’s pretty silly that for a modern filesystem meant to compete with ZFS and BtrFS, to have the main 21st century feature turned off by default. But it’s not quite ridiculous. Not yet.

Now it turns out that scrubbing is only supported on Windows Server 2016. Microsoft honestly shipped an integrity-checking filesystem in Windows 10 with no way to repair or scrub it.

I used to say that Windows 10 is the best Windows ever, and that Microsoft kinda won my trust back. But what the hell?

I contacted Microsoft support over chat, who first suggested I do a system restore (sigh). But after I insisted that they please confirm that it’s supposed to work confirmed that no that only ships with Windows Server.

It’s not even clear from their pricing if I need the $882 Standard Edition or the $6,155 Datacenter Edition. Either one is way too much for such a standard feature.

What the hell, Microsoft? All I want is a checksumming file system. Either provide it, or don’t. Don’t give me a checksumming filesystem that can’t be repaired or verified.

It may even be worse. Rumors seem to be that Microsoft turned off this feature in the 1709 release. How’s that for a bait-and-switch?

It’s cheaper to buy a whole new server just to run ZFS or BtrFS on it, and use it from Windows, than it is to actually store files reliably on the Windows machine itself. Absolutely ridiculous.

For the record, the way you would run a scrub, if you could, is:

Start-ScheduledTask -TaskPath "\Microsoft\Windows\Data Integrity Scan\" -TaskName "Data Integrity Scan"

Repair one file with:

Repair-FileIntegrity -FileName 'E:\somefile.png'

Or repair a whole tree with:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'E:\' -Recurse | Repair-FileIntegrity