Death of the File System: It's About Time

Computerworld - The mother of modern file systems, the Unix file system, has been with us since 1974 -- practically as long as files have existed. The first file systems were designed with a single directory, but over time you were able to create nested folders and organize your files as desired. Back in the good old days, this wasn't too much of a problem -- storage capacities were low relative to document sizes, and you had to look in only a relatively small number of folders to find your file or application.
However, as storage capacities continue to skyrocket (see "Seagate Announces 2.5-in. HDD With 160GB Capacity"), even our personal laptop computers suddenly have tens of thousands of files, buried in a large number of folders, themselves nested inside other folders. It's common now for directory trees (the nest of directories within directories found in any modern file system) to have depths of five or 10 directories. To compound the issue, everyone files documents in different ways. My style of organizing data is more than likely completely different from yours. How long do you suppose it would take you to find a file on my system or, even worse, one I had placed on a server we both shared?
Finding any kind of file in this morass becomes nearly impossible, and once a file has moved off the "my recent documents" list, it can become lost forever. To fix this problem, many operating systems provide search tools that scan the file system for data, but these are horribly slow, even on small file systems. When searching file systems with deeply nested directories and thousands of files, the process is so slow as to be painful.
Indexing Engines to the Rescue
Within the past year, a number of powerful indexing engines have come to market, the most popular of these being Google Desktop Search. As the name implies, this program offers a search capability that resides on your desktop, while behind the scenes it constantly scans all data stored on your system -- indexing the names of files, folders and directories as well as content for well-understood file types such as Adobe PDF or Microsoft Office applications. In seconds, you can enter key phrases and see any relevant file, calendar events or even e-mail that relates to your search. These indexing tools work well but can update only as quickly as they can index the host file system, which can be quite some time for the initial index. After the initial system