Hierarchical file systems are dead

  • Authors:
  • Margo Seltzer;Nicholas Murphy

  • Affiliations:
  • Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences;Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

  • Venue:
  • HotOS'09 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Hot topics in operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

For over forty years, we have assumed hierarchical file system namespaces. These namespaces were a rudimentary attempt at simple organization. As users have begun to interact with increasing amounts of data and are increasingly demanding search capability, such a simple hierarchical model has outlasted its usefulness. For this reason, we should design file systems whose organizations map to the ways we access and manipulate data now. We present a new file system architecture in which we replace the hierarchical namespace with a tagged, search-based one.