Question

I’ve been thinking on this for a while now (you know, that dangerous thing programmers tend to do) and I’ve been wondering, is the method of storing data that we’re so accustomed to really all that efficient? The trouble with answering this question is that I really don’t have anything to compare it to, since it’s the only thing I’ve ever used.

I don’t mean FAT or NTFS or a particular type of file system, I mean the filesystem structure as a whole. We are simply used to thinking of ‘files’ inside ‘folders’ like our hard drive was one giant filing cabinet. This is a great analogy and indeed, it makes it a lot easier to learn when we think of it this way, but is it really the best way to go about describing programs and their respective parts?

I’d like to know if anyone can think of (or knows about) a data storage technique that might be used to store data for an Operating System to use that would organize the parts of data in a different manner. Does anything… different even exist?

Answer 1

Emails are often stored in folders. But ever since I have migrated to Gmail, I have become accustomed to classifying my emails with tags.

I often wondered if we could manage a whole file-system that way: instead of storing files in folders, you could tag files with the tags you like. A file identifier would not look like this:

/home/john/personal/contacts.txt 

but more like this:

contacts[john,personal] 

Well… just food for thought (maybe this already exists!)