On Thu, Mar 02, 2000 at 02:59:58AM +0100, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Kevin P. Neal wrote:
> > > Wow, this Single Instance Store sure is an incredible advance in computing...
> > > Do you think we can implement something like this for NetBSD?
> > > http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/02-28w2k.asp
> > Sounds like a waste of time, a bunch of extra complexity that's going
> > to break sometime, or just plain unneeded (at least on Unix).
> ``Dupmerge reads a list of files from standard input (eg., as produced by
> "find . -print") and looks for identical files. When it finds two or more

The description does some like a bit more than symlinks. It looks like it
does comparison and duplicate 'elimination' at the block level. Perhaps it
builds block-chains, kind of like a VM system. I wonder what the overhead
is when a block is changed? Does it just have to break and re-link the
block chains (sounds like a risky FS operation) or does it have to create
a copy of the entire file or all of the file before or after the newly
differentiated block?

For me, the interesting comment was "The result is a feature that frees
up as much as 80 to 90 percent of the space on a server, allowing users
to store as much as five to 10 times the information as they could before."

Sounds like there's a lot of redundancy in Microsoft files.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Although some of you out
there might find a microwave oven controlled by a Unix system an attractive
idea, controlling a microwave oven is easily accomplished with the smallest
of microcontrollers. - Russ Hersch - (Microcontroller primer and FAQ)