It retained some superficial attributes from DFS; the directory separator continued to be a dot and $ now indicated the hierarchical root of the filesystem.
The BBC Master Compact contained ADFS version 2.0, which provided the addition of format, verify and backup commands in ROM, but omitted support for hard discs.
[citation needed] Disc corruption could also occur if attempting to use the *COMPACT command without disabling the blinking text cursor.
A per-file "type" attribute was added in space previously used to store Load and Execute addresses.
The 12 bits of type information is used to denote the contents or intended use of a file, typically presented as three hexadecimal digits.
The allocation strategy is optimised to minimise fragmentation, and sometimes performs defragmentation as part of a file storage operation.
[citation needed] More recent versions of RISC OS, including those for Iyonix, continue to provide ADFS, and have further extended it to cope with larger hard disc sizes.
This allows for other hardware to use the ADFS format easily, such as IDEFS (commonly used for IDE add-on cards), SCSIFS, and the network-aware AppFS.
FileCore and FileSwitch's functions are in some ways similar to the IFS and IO system managers in Windows NT.
Tools such as Omniflop (in Windows 2000 and later), and Libdsk support permit the 'physical' layout of ADFS floppies to be read on PC systems utilising an internal drive.