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View Full Version : Windows 7 style libraries?



munkifisht
October 23rd, 2014, 11:00 PM
I have been looking for a solution to this but have yet to find anything useful. One thing that I find incredibly good with Windows 7 was the introduction of libraries. Windows libraries, in case you done know sort of work like symlinks. They amalgamate the contents of different folders into a virtual folder.


Why would this be useful? Well, in my example, I have 10 HDDs, all of them with a variety of media organised into different catagories. Frankly it's a pain to have to sift through drive after drive to get what I want. Libraries remove this trouble, so for example all the folders that have pictures in them are lumped into one virtual folder and this is where I go when I need to find something.

TheFu
October 24th, 2014, 12:27 AM
Libraries only work in the GUI - never from cmd.exe. Libraries are NOT part of the file system which makes it really hard for non-GUI programs or scripts to access them. That doesn't seem smart to me, but on Windows, I'm like a penguin in the desert and expecting things to work the UNIX way is extremely frustrating to me.

So there are multiple ways to achieve similar outcomes with non-standard Linux file systems. I don't use these, but many people do - web search for unionfs vs to get some ideas. I think there are at least 5 options. The media center guys will know them all. If you use these things, please, please, please, have excellent backups - especially if you decide on LVM and spanning volumes. Don't be the guy who comes back next month when 1 drive in the 9 drive LVM volume dies and all the data across all of those drives is gone (and not have at ;east 1 backup copy).

BTW, if you know the file name - you can use locate to find them almost instantly on disk and if you want to search inside files or metadata recoll is amazing. Personally, I have a script that can be run from anywhere on the network that searches data partitions across all the machines to locate files. It also searches a DB with off-line storage too.

Trying to do things the Windows way isn't always the best idea on a different OS. Regardless, I hope the flexibility in Linux serves what you need.