Joerg Moellenkamp’s post explaining CacheFS has me excited:

Long ago, admins didn’t want to manage dozens of operating system installations. Instead of this they wanted to store all this data on a central fileserver (you know, the network is the computer). Thus netbooting Solaris and SunOS was invented. But there was a problem: All the users started to work at 9 o’clock. They switched on their workstations and the load on the fileserver and the network got higher and higher. Thus the idea of CacheFS [as a way of using the speed of local disk and the convenience of central management] was born.

Remove the corporate office and the uncaring sysadmins, and CacheFS might be exactly what I’m looking for to elastically expand the capacity of my laptop’s internal storage. This isn’t some newfangled technology, Sun developed it in the early 90s and it’s been available for Linux since 2003 (try it in Gentoo). And most importantly, it’s “designed to be as transparent as possible to a user of the system. Applications should just be able to use NFS files as normal, without any knowledge of there being a cache.”

The local cache isn’t expected to be a complete mirror of the remote filesystem, just the recently opened files. So the capacity of your local disk is limited only by your willingness to wait for files to be retrieved from the network. The biggest problem is figuring out what happens when the network isn’t available. CacheFS doesn’t appear to solve that and would likely fail if the network dropped.

I know nothing about filesystem development, but this challenge is interesting enough to make me consider jumping in. The availability of a partial solution helps too.

Ups to hindesite for the sweet drive photo. Too bad about what happened to it, though.

Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more.

The MacBook Air’s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed with 8GB of music (and that’s after spending hours paring it down a few weeks ago), and almost 50GB of pictures. I’ve piled up almost 10GB of email, another 10GB of stuff in my downloads and desktop folders that I can’t quite place nor get rid of, and a paltry 5GB of just plain old documents.

That’s about 80GB of my own stuff, add to that 8GB of applications and 15GB of stuff in /Library, /System, and /var (well, /private/var). Now recognize that a “120GB” drive can really only store about 110GB and you see my problem.

My photo library grows fast. I took 1.5GB of photos last weekend. Most of them are junk, and I’ve started actually tossing ones I don’t think I’ll ever use, but it hurts. I’ve also tried burning photos of to CD or DVD, but that defeats the point of having a library in the first place. And none of this changes the fact that, even without my photos, I’d be bumping in to the limits of the Air’s disk capacity (let’s assume that I’d be getting the 80GB HDD model, not the 64GB and at least $1000 more expensive SSD model). And then I have to ask myself “do I really care if I have a Mac if I can’t have iPhoto?” The short answer is “less so.”

So here’s my real question: Why hasn’t Apple figured out how to offer me a storage solution that puts frequently used items on local disk, and less-frequently used items on a network disk? Seamlessly.

Really. I want my iPhoto and iTunes to work just like they always have, but if it’s been a while since I looked at the pictures of my sister’s graduation from a few years ago, I want it to put them on a remote disk. And when I do decide to look at them again, I want it to fetch them from that remote disk and show them to me as though they’d never left. It might take a moment longer for me to load them from the network, but I can suffer that. Especially if it means I don’t have to manage where they are for myself.

It’s amazing how many pieces of this are already in place. The network is nearly ubiquitous. Unix and Linux have had union filesystems for years. Clearly somebody would have to think seriously about what happens if the network isn’t there, but that’s solvable. The value of having a hard drive with elastic capacity and seamless live backups is certainly worth it.

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

tags: availability, big stick, dictum, findability, google, google economy, idea, ideas, influence, search, search results, value