Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snapshots
Does NILFS do checksums and snapshotting for every single file in the system? One of my biggest complaints about file systems in general is that they are all designed to treat every file the exact same way.We now have storage systems (even SSDs) that are big enough to hold hundreds of millions of files. Those files can be a mix of small files, big files, temp files, personal files, and public files. Yet every file system must treat your precious thesis paper the same way it treats a huge cat video you downloaded off the Internet.We need some kind of 'object store' where each object can be given a set of attributes that govern how the file system treats it. Backup, encryption, COW, checksums, and other operations should not be wasted on a bunch of data that no one really cares about.I have been working on a kind of object file system that addresses this problem.