The problem -- and I&#x27;ve been burned on both sides of this -- is that you need either a container file, or you need users to understand that a directory is essentially a file.  Not only does this complicate users lives when they want to move what they, quite reasonably, view as a single file between different computers or back it up, but they can and will remove individual pieces.  Or copy it around and have some of the pieces not show up and be very confused that copy&#x2F;move operations -- particularly to&#x2F;from a NAS -- are now nothing like atomic.<p>Another thing that will happen is this: if you just use a directory full of files as a single logical file, you will end up writing code that does the equivalent of &#x27;rm -rf ${somedir}&#x27; because when users choose to overwrite &quot;files&quot; (really, a directory), you need to clear out any previous data so experiment runs don&#x27;t get mixed.  You can easily see where this can go bad; you will have to take extraordinary care.