Personal hierarchical storage

re: Personal hierarchical storage

Scott Mitchell — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:59:00 GMT

There have been file systems created in academia that do similar things. Like ones that backup your files automatically based on heuristics like how often the file is modified used per unit time and how long it has been since the last backup.

The point is, with multi-GB HDs, and the price / GB being so cheap, is there any reason you need to have files transparently zipped? The only real advantage of zipping, IMO, is for file transportation (via email, for example).

re: Personal hierarchical storage

Kelly Jones — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:21:00 GMT

I think Windows 2000 Server offers something along these lines. If I remember right, it can pull files off of tape and serve them up to the user as though it never left the hard drive. I think the administrator has to move the files to tape to begin with though.

re: Personal hierarchical storage

Kent Sharkey — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 06:19:00 GMT

Scott: I think there still is a reason for this. It seems like my HDD is always too close to full with stuff I installed months ago, but never looked at since. Assorted items that, "I should look at this." but never really did. Or documents I wrote that aren't important enough to look at daily, but I don't want to go away. Plus, despite all efforts, it seems to slow down my drive (I'm a fanatic for defragging, but sometimes there's not enough space). Zipping I mentioned for the space improvements (and available libraries), but I think any type of semi-bye bye would help me and my always full drives.

TTFN - Kent

re: Personal hierarchical storage

Kent Sharkey — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 06:23:00 GMT

Kelly -- that's always the gotcha - most of the HSM products work with tape, and I never seem to have a tape drive hooked up to my laptop. I used to work at a great place that had a tape library hooked up to the network, and life was good. Now that my poor little laptop fills it's hard drive with assorted betas, virtual PCs of the next OS and/or development environment (not to name names), I long for the days that stuff just appears or disappears as I need it.

TTFN - Kent

re: Personal hierarchical storage

Sandy — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 08:29:00 GMT

WinXP's HDD Clean Up wizard does something of this sort, in the sense it can identify the files not been accessed in a long time and then it compresses them on disk using the Disk Compression (its not zip algorithm, i guess). So the best part is that you don't have to extract the zip files, all the files / apps work just like before .. but they also save space!

Although I am not too sure how you would invoke it directly, but it generally shows up when you are starting to run out of disk space..