Re: [9fans] Ideas for gc on venti

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> What do you think about that approach ?

I think you will lose your data.

The greatest strength of venti, and also of
the worm file system, is that once data is written,
those disk blocks are never changed again.
That makes it virtually impossible to lose data
due to software or human errors.  This is no small thing.

Why not just use an ordinary file system?
What benefit are you deriving from using venti
that is making all this rewriting worthwhile?

If it's just that when two people upload the same
file, you don't store it twice, you could just store
files named by their SHA1 hashes in an ordinary
file system.

Russ