Hierarchical File Systems Are Dead

For over forty years, the authors have assumed hierarchical file system namespaces. These namespaces were a rudimentary attempt at simple organization. As users have begun to interact with increasing amounts of data and are increasingly demanding search capability, such a simple hierarchical model has outlasted its usefulness. For this reason, they should design file systems whose organizations map to the ways they access and manipulate data now. They present a new file system architecture in which they replace the hierarchical namespace with a tagged, search-based one.