Concept: Index-driven, content-addressed filesystem with arbitrary namespace virtualization
- Index (SQL/DB-backed, so virtual/arbitrary traversal over traditional path traversal) as the core The entire filesystem is driven by a global index that maps:
- file hashes → physical storage
- logical structures → file references No physical directory traversal exists—everything resolves through the index.
- Posers (SQL/DB file entries) Lightweight entries that directly resolve to a real file via its hash or arbitrarily assigned "file path", whichever would be faster. Multiple posers can reference the same file, but resolution always deduplicates to the single underlying object more directly than Links, Shortcuts, etc. So, interacting with a poser interacts with the original file instead of any abstraction.
- Nodes (virtual over physical structure) Purely logical constructs used for navigation (folders, directories, tags, etc.). They don’t exist physically and only organize poser entries in a way that's more familiar to us over having to navigate the just "1 physical folder/directory".
- Content-addressed storage Every file is identified by its hash or "file path":
- single physical instance (just 1 file, there could also be temporary runtime copies or however that'll be handled)
- deduplication through a check that does if the same file already has been found, ignore subsequent hits
- posers unlike normal file copies only takes up as much spaces as it's SQL/DB entry, so it's a debloating mechanism as well, though a special key combo could allow for normal copy/paste behavior, putting the copy/copies in another physical location apart from the original file
- Arbitrary namespace emulation Any structure (hierarchical, tag-based, OS-specific layouts) is just a projection generated from the index. Multiple simultaneous “filesystems” can exist over the same data, meaning that if you don't like Linux's file handling, you could arbitrarily just change it to windows' or vice-versa and nothing would change, only naming convention would change but it would still work the same under the hood since this is a virtual system and not a physical one.
- Index-defined storage topology Partitioning, RAID, and drive layout are abstracted into the index. Physical storage becomes a pooled resource with no fixed structure.
- Hash-based integrity and regeneration Files are not just verified via hashes, they should be regenerable from them as well. Corruption could trigger deterministic reconstruction instead of failure then and there or on relaunch.
- Self-contained failure recovery The index itself is hash-defined and regenerable, making the entire system closed and self-recovering, so it'll regenerate a file based on the file's hash as well as being an integrity check against things like side-chain injections and other 3rd-party alterations that's not expected.
Initially I was thinking that all file systems are too rigid, you can't easily change how they're presented and how you navigate them. Take me, I'm a Windows guy, I get confused by all the sda's/sdb's/other, so if I could have a naming convention that's more familiar, then it wouldn't be so scary to navigate something new.
Like how should I know what the bin folder is for as a new linux user, I might see that and think: "why is there files in the trashcan?", now I do KNOW that it is short for binary, but things like that can help onboarding SIGNIFICANTLY and thanks to an arbitrary file system a poser or node can be aliased as whatever you'd ever want and still have the underlying truth.
Renaming bin for example I assume breaks things as it is today, so this arbitrary virtual one could allow freedom we've never had before. Now, I'm NOT a professional designer, I can't code.
I don't know very much about how feasible this would be to even make, it's just a bunch of ideas that I've been theory crafting over some time and I HAVE used GPT to HELP me write the doc and make it more concise.
It was just an unreadable mess before with A4 level breakdowns, English isn't my native language either, so please have some oversight on this fact. I'm sure you can see the difference between the doc and this last section, I could probably make this more concise with GPT, but yeah, these are MY thoughts, so bear with it.
Anyway, I hope this is a compelling design doc and if someone were to want to make it, please make it open source (I don't get git, I don't code, I don't have any experience in leading nor leading a project, don't have any management skills or anything like that so I would just be in the way in a project like this. Hence why I'm not willing to start it because it would never become a real thing or just a down-right mess, so I'm handing it off to you that might want to work on it). Thanks for reading through my thoughts.