I have been reading about alternate data streams and I am kind of curious if any big applications for Windows actually uses this feature of NTFS.
I am also really curious as to whether or not traditional backup and archiving utilities back up this data and is able to be restored.
Best Answer
Alternate Data Streams in NTFS Applies to
Very small ADS (Alternate Data Streams) are also added within Internet Explorer (and now also other browsers) to mark files that have been downloaded from external sites: *they may be unsafe to run locally and the local shell will require confirmation from the user before opening them. When the user indicates that he no longer wants this confirmation dialog, this ADS is simply dropped from the MFT entry for downloaded files.
Resource from Wikipedia