I don't know if this solution exists already, but here goes...

It would be nice to have a multi-tier file system. One where a single file might exist in multiple locations within the file system. Similar to how on the Empeg, you can have songs in multiple places, but they are only pointers to the actual file.

Here is my situation. I download a lot of stuff from news. Among other things, I collect Simpsons episodes. When I download them, after checking the file to make sure it is OK, I place it in a "to be archived" directory. Periodically, I touch all my "to be archived" directories and dump to DVD. At that point, I might choose to delete the file, or place it in my "media" directory. In my media directory I have shares set up for xbmp on my xbox - so I can browse through my different shows on my xbox and watch on regular TV.

The problem here - it would be wasteful to copy a newly downloaded episode and put it in the "to be archived" dir, and also place it in the "media" directory. So, I settled on putting the "to be archived" directories in my "media" directory structure. That is annoying, because I cannot organize the shows by season.

It would be nice to have an archival directory, and also have the same file exist in my media directory. Therefore, when performing archiving functions, I can easily sort and distinguish what needs to be archived. And for media file viewing purposes, everything in the media directory is neatly organized by show and season. Under such an arrangement, there would be 2 instances/pointers of the file in the file system.

But with the capacity of hard drive ever increasing, I might just resort to the wasteful methodology. At any given time, I would be wasting a maximum of 4.7 gb.

This is sometimes referred to as hard linking, whereby the concepts of a file and of directory entries which reference said file are separate entities. Standard feature on nearly all operating systems. Not on yours?

Cheers

Of course Plan9 (the UNIX successor from Bell Labs that became Inferno) even did the multi-level migration automatically. Nothing was ever finally and irrecoverably deleted. In effect, the disks were just a cache for the CD-W jukebox.

Assuming Windows, NTFS has a hard link feature, but it's not generally accessible via the OS. Good show. I think there are utilities out there that'll let you create them, but I don't know what the impact might be.

If he's using an OS without NTFS support, like 9x or Me then he's out of luck.

Googling on "ntfs hard link" turned up some stuff, including utilities to make them. There was also a reference to a MS KB article on how to create them that's since been deleted.

> There was also a reference to a MS KB article on how to
> create them that's since been deleted.

Knowing MS, that's pretty good evidence you should avoid that "feature" under their OS...

-brendan

It might have had to do with a reported "security exploit" by which a person could create a hard link to another file and then the auditing process wouldn't catch accesses to the new link. It was unclear whether this was a problem because the audit wouldn't see the access under the new name at all, or if it reported it only under the new name, or if it allowed one to bypass filesystem permissions somehow. Regardless, it didn't seem like a problem with the link itself, but how other elements of the OS dealt with it, and then only from a "it might do something other than what you expect" or "our other tools are broken" point of view.

use junction from sysinternals.com to do the hard links to directories. i use it a lot for "My Documents" archiving.

And if the "OS" is DOS, one might still be able to find the DOS "symlink" utility I wrote/distributed long, long ago..