ding ding ding! This is the monkey in the wrench as it were.<p>Tagging <i>is</i> a really useful idea, it is also a <i>naming</i> thing and as such either it lives in the naming infrastructure (aka dirents) or it rots over time. A simple example I used to use in the &#x27;object naming&#x27; [1] days was, imagine that instead of house numbers on the street you wrote down last names. That works fine until somebody moves and now not only did you show up at the wrong house, you don&#x27;t even have a chance of knowing what the correct house is. [2]<p>Microsoft&#x27;s LongHorn project was way out there but took a swing at the actual problem. Just make the file system an actual relational database. Then your home directory is simply &#x27;select * from files where (owner = chuck);&#x27; It really does solve the problem at a more fundamental level, using naming by attribute rather than mapping. I got to observe that effort from the outside (I was at NetApp at the time) but I believe it died due to really horrible performance issues.<p>I find it pretty awesome that people <i>can</i> lose files, back when a &quot;big&quot; hard drive was 100MB it really wasn&#x27;t all that hard to just look through all the files on it, but when its a couple or three terabytes, all bets are off!<p>[1] Object File systems were all the rage in the early 2000&#x27;s, files themselves were object ids and the naming was a database that connected object ids to user recognizable names. -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Object_storage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Object_storage</a><p>[2] The typical solution is to add &quot;tombstones&quot; or redirects at the previous address. That then is a layer of additional meta data to maintain, and sometimes the file doesn&#x27;t move, it just changes value (trivial example you have a file &#x27;my-favorite-song.mp3&#x27; which is tagged &#x27;jazz mp3&#x27; and then you discover techno and make something from Tiesto your favorite song and while the name and type are still valid, the tag &#x27;jazz&#x27; is now invalid.