A useful report says what Ferail was doing, which exact build was running, and includes the diagnostic file produced for that failure. You never need to send your files, thumbnails, directory listing, or an unredacted screenshot.

File and folder path redaction is enabled by default for Copy report and Create report bundle. Ferail replaces user path components before building the shareable output, always removes the home-directory account name, saves the result locally, and never uploads it automatically. You can inspect the exact sanitized activity trail under Settings → Diagnostics. Native minidumps can contain incidental process memory, so review them before sharing. See the Privacy Policy for the complete boundary.

1. Record the Ferail version shown in the title bar, operating system and CPU architecture. On Windows, say whether you used the setup or portable ZIP.
2. Give the shortest repeatable steps, what you expected, and what happened. Mention the selected tool and important options, plus whether the location was local, removable, network, cloud-backed, WSL, or an archive.
3. Add approximate scale and resource observations: item count, elapsed time, Task Manager/Activity Monitor CPU and memory, and whether the UI recovered. Approximate figures are enough; do not include file names.
4. Attach the newest matching report from Ferail's reports folder. Settings → Diagnostics shows and opens the exact folder.

Default report locations are:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Ferail\reports
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Ferail/reports
• Linux: the reports folder under Ferail's XDG config directory, normally ~/.config/ferail/reports

Private Mode (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K) keeps Ferail's layout visible while replacing personal text and content. Use it before screenshots or video. Native dialogs and other applications are outside Ferail's window, so check those yourself.

Leave the frozen window open for at least 15 seconds. The watchdog writes ferail-hang-<pid>-<sequence>.txt. On Windows it also starts a clean broker which writes a same-stem .dmp; attach both files because the dump contains the thread stacks which explain where the UI stopped.

If Windows did not produce a .dmp, open Task Manager → Details, right-click Ferail.exe, choose Create dump file, and attach that dump with the text report. For macOS/Linux, a run started from a terminal can also be sampled with Ctrl+\ while it is stalled. Say whether restarting with --safe-mode changes the result.

The maintainer must use the PDB bundle from the exact same Windows release; PDBs from another version cannot reliably symbolize a dump. The release's Ferail-<version>-x64-symbols.zip contains the matching identity manifest.

Attach the newest ferail-crash-*.txt and any same-stem .dmp from the reports folder. Also include the final console lines if Ferail was launched from a terminal. Do not paste only a screenshot of an exception: the text report and dump contain the actionable module, backtrace, and thread state.

Fast NTFS reads the raw NTFS metadata of the containing volume. Windows therefore requires an elevated helper even though the scan is read-only. The Ferail GUI itself remains unprivileged and falls back to Portable scanning if UAC is declined or the helper fails.

Use the helper from the same package as the Ferail build being tested. It is beside Ferail.exe in both the installed application and portable folder. Open PowerShell as Administrator, change to that folder, then run:

.\ferail-ntfs-helper.exe --help
.\ferail-ntfs-helper.exe --diagnose "C:\path\to\scan" *> "$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\fast-ntfs-diagnostic.txt"

The path may be a whole local NTFS volume (C:\) or a subdirectory. The helper builds the volume index once and reports the requested subtree. Its shareable output contains aggregate geometry, phases, record rates, counts, bytes and timings, not the requested path or any file name.

Expected success ends with a --- report --- block containing mft, subtree, skipped, and timing lines. When reporting a problem, attach the redirected text and also say:

• whether PowerShell was elevated and whether UAC appeared;
• filesystem and drive type (NTFS local SSD/HDD or mounted VHDX);
• whole volume or subdirectory;
• whether Ferail's Fast scan completed, fell back to Portable, or was cancelled;
• Ferail/helper version, elapsed time, peak GUI/helper memory, and any hang or crash report created at the same time.

Do not use this diagnostic on FAT, exFAT, ReFS, network paths, WSL paths, or cloud placeholders whose data is not on a local NTFS volume; those are expected to use the portable filesystem walker.