Windows identifier file? what is up?

[Cr0nJ0b]

I'm having lots of PC issues this month...I took an outage with a RAID 0 set, that I recovered and I've rebuilt my OS like 10 times...So here is the latest...

I have a fresh install of windows, which seems to be working fine for now.

On my data drive (that I recovered from a broken RAID 0 stripe), All the files seem to be there. There are a few (acronis backups) that aren't working or seem truncated, but that could have happened before the other issues.

My main question relates to these "IDENTIFIER" files that I'm now seeing all over the place. I never say them before, but now they are everywhere. For almost every file there is a second file with the same name, but there is a "_Zone.Identifier" appeded to the file name. So there is a foo.exe and a foo.exe_Zone.Identifier file in the root of the file system.

there were some in the favorites and desktop directories as well.

I've googled the term and i get that it's a metadata file, but how did it get there and where did it come from? Can I delete them, hide them...fix them? what?

I suspect that it has to do with a fix I applied to get an ASUS program to work (the fix did something with streams...that I think hosed the system.)

thoughts?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Although Zone.Identifier files are generally used for ADS that windows uses for security purposes on downloaded internet files, they can also be created when transfering file shares. My guess is that rebuilding your RAID array had a hand in it

A quick read on ADS: Zone.Identifier Alternate Data Streams , And this from How-To Geek

Batch removal of Zone.Identifier files from "Windows Sysinternals" by Mark Russinovich: Streams v1.56

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I ended up just doing a seach and deleting all the ones I could find. I think something happened while I was fixing my old Filesystem, because there are a lot of anomolies...like the desktop.ini files all being visible. oh well.