I really liked the efficiency of the ZFS and we’ll see where these times lead us to filesystem management. Your idea about eliminating the Hierarchy standard file management sounds appealing. I think our future lies in the metadata, and if we manage that well along with the underlying FS then we’re fine, or in the clear. Hopefully now.

James Heaver wrote:

This feels revolutionary but shortsighted at the same time. Do we still need partitions and hardrives in the same way at all?
With the development of more types of storage, SSD, flash drives, cloud etc, we’re reaching a point where a computer should use multiple different storage mediums seamlessly.
System files – on a super fast SSD
MP3s and AVIs – on a super slow HDD, probably somewhere else on the network.
Documents and emails – synced to the cloud (or edge) and available on every machine and logon you use, aswell as through a web interface.
At this point the partitions become pointless. I want ‘My Pictures’ to be a folder view of Flickr. I want ‘My Documents’ to be a folder view of Google Docs, with everything available in ODT format so I can open in locally. I don’t want just my data partition mounted to /home, I want to pull bits of data from everywhere.

You can have mounted dirs inside other monted dirs – So you can have /home in one partition, and you can mount FlickrFS in /home/username/photos, and GooFS for your /home/username/documents.

Have I told you I love Fuse, and it’s filesystems? :)
Curlftpfs is especially useful.

@ James Heaver:

Thanks for the link to the edge talk – too bad it cuts off halfway through. I read O’Brien’s whole rant, and I really enjoyed it.

To me the main issue with the edge is reliability. It’s the vacation syndrome – ie. your home server dies 3 days after you leave for a 3 week vacation.

Actually, I’d fucking love to take a 3 week vacation, but unfortunately hardly anyone on this side of the big pond has that many vacation days in a year to begin with. That’s the thing I really miss about living in Europe – vacations were proper length there. When I was a kid, my family would spend at minimum a month out of the year vacationing at the Baltic sea. But I digress…

What I personally like is the combination of Edge and Cloud technology. Stuff like getdropbox.com actually get this stuff right. With Dropbox I have a local cache of my files on every computer I bind to my account. If I lose one of the nodes, I can restore it from another one. And if I don’t have connection to the cloud, I still have access to all my data everywhere that I used it.

@ copperfish:

Actually, most linux distros will keep most of “application settings” in your home directory. For example your Firefox profile is in ~/.mozilla folder. Most of your personalized KDE settings sit in ~/.kde and etc…

System wide settings are usually somewhere in /etc but anything pertaining to userland apps or your particular user account sit in ~.

This is a problem with Windows though seeing how most XP era games loved to keep saves in the game folder inside C:\Program Files. Vista curbed this a bit by requiring privilege escalation to write to Program Files. Newer games tend to put their saves somewhere in C:\Users.

Also Vista sort of changed the focus from My Documents to the user home directory. Standard folders like Pictures, Music and Video are now outside Documents folder. Therefore the implication is that if you want to back up your documents and settings you should back up the whole C:\Users\username folder rather than Documents alone.

This is much better than the XP way in which My Documents is a special shortcut on desktop and in the Start Menu and the purpose of the Documents and Settings is something most users remain blisfully ignorant about.

@ Matt`:

Yep. But as I said above, new applications written in the age of Vista and Windows 7 are much more aware of this issue and tend to store their data where they should – in the home directory. It’s either that, or require users to run them as Admin which is a great way to annoy the hell out of your user base.

Here are few examples – on Vista Bioshock saves games in:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Bioshock

Assasin’s Creed saves in:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Ubisoft\AssasinsCreed

Bioware games now save in:

C:\Users\username\Documents\BioWare

So this trend is changing.

I have the whole “Documents and Settings” folder on a separate partition, which mostly works well, but occasionally doesn’t when I forget that something’s being stored on the C: drive with the OS and programs.

For me the ideal system would let me nuke the OS whenever I want with nothing else in the firing line, so have 3 partitions – OS, Programs and Data. But there’s always issues with the fact that “Program Files” defaults to C: (I’ve yet to find an easy way of changing that, in the same vein as how you can fiddle with the registry to move your personal folders)

Then programs continue to have “C:/Program Files” hardwired as their install location, reinstalling Windows blanks out the whole “Add/Remove Programs” list because the programs haven’t been installed to that install of Windows – they still work, but you lose the utility of a collected list of what you have installed. The whole thing just gets annoying so I stick with the OS and programs being together. With the unfortunate side effect that any settings or data that get stored under the program folder will get wiped if I reinstall the OS.

If you can clearly partition off only data, then it makes sense.

The problem with current versions of Windows, Linux and (I assume) OSX et al. is that /home or “My Documents” is a dumping ground for anything but data. Application preferences and data sit everywhere.

So you keep your home partition – great. You keep your data and documents – great. But stuff like saved games and application preferences get overwritten when you install an application again – not so great. Worse, the average user has no idea those hidden configuration files are there.

This will remain a painful manual process into the future until we get some kind of portable application preferences XML standard or something similar. Install Shield and DEB/RPM packagers are you listening?

@ Luke Maciak:

Thats why I generally prefer an edge solution to a cloud solution.

I don’t trust data in the cloud. From examples such as the sidekick dataloss to a uk example where the voicemails of several royals and celebrities were hacked into by a newspaper.

I would store my data my local network and have it accesible over the internet.

You would need some way of tracking how secure a document was. If you’re integrating with flickr etc then you would already need to highlight which are public and which aren’t

@Zel
I can see your point about knowing where things are, but part of this would involve duplicated storage and backup. Of course everything would be stored on your slow HD along with wherever else it’s stored.

There are also cloud based solutions that are secure. These distributed, encrypted schemes. Again, this feeds into the edge based ideal of things.

@ Mart:

Yes, that’s true. The problem is, hardly anyone is doing it. When you set up machine for a friend or relative do you go through all this trouble or do you just slap on the OS with all the default settings, install antivirus and call it a day? Most people do the latter rather than the former.

Defaults are a powerful thing – if this was a default feature, everyone would be using it without thinking about it to much.

@ Randy:

Nice, I didn’t realize that. I usually format drive between test installs, and merely upgrade my main ‘buntu box without reinstalling.

@ James Heaver:

Wow, great idea. I’d love to see more machines being built with several dedicated drives. Super fast SD drive for system files, another one for programs, large capacity traditional HD for data, etc..

One thing about cloud content – this does pose some security concerns. For example, where do I put my pr0n collection? Or for example “private” pictures of significant other – ones that you wouldn’t want floating online, even if they are supposedly secure behind login screen and encrypted. Or your pirated music and movies?

Also, having your data live in the cloud would introduce a lot of latency. I’d ideally want the data to be mirrored locally, and synced with the cloud the way getdropbox.com does it. Otherwise, having your system files on super-fast SD drive won’t mean anything if your data is on a super-slow network drive. Working with your files will feel sluggish.

@ Morty:

I used Ubuntu as an example because it is one of the few linux distros available as OEM. You can for example buy a Dell machine with Ubuntu on it, and sure as hell it will have two partitions: / and swap, because that’s the default.

This basically makes Ubuntu the most common “beginner” distro. Seasoned Linux users can and will reach for different Linux brands, but they usually have enough know-how to set up their partitions correctly to begin with. An average computer user (ie. the silent majority) on the other hand will buy a machine with Windows, OSX or Ubuntu and all of them will have a single partition setup.

I’m basically saying that these particular systems could really use a multi-partition default, because it would make it the de-facto standard for MOST computer users.

At least this was my experience while installing Ubuntu.

Yes, and as far as i can tell it’s about the only distribution doing so. So your line of arguing kind of falls trough. If you look at desktop Linux installation base world wide, you see the majority do not do this. If you actually look at the big installation and tone down the Ubuntu hype to realistic proportions, you will see sane behavior from the other major distributions(Wich together have a far greater install base than Ubuntu). Like (Open)Suse, Mandriva not to forget Red-Flag.

I think Ubuntu has just dumbed down everything too much – Mandriva and Sidux for example create separate root and home partitions by default (the way it should be), and also have very a user friendly custom partitioning option in the installer. You can simply select the data partition and specify /home as the mont point.