I'm
currently in the process of installing Windows Vista on a test machine
in order to study the new file system Microsoft is releasing. To share
this information with you, I will be writing various articles revealing
all of my findings. This is the first of a very promising series of
articles written from the perspective of a professional Data Recovery
engineer.
Hi friends, let’s talk this time about the new concept in file manager
that will be introduced by Microsoft in its new Operating system
Windows Vista. The name of this new file administration is “WinFS”.
WinFS is a new file system that it’s being developed by Microsoft to be
used in its new operating system Windows Vista. At the begining this
name means Windows Future Storage, but now is only Windows File System.
Acctually, there is no clear information about what “WinFS” is. Some
people say that is a complete new file system and others say that WinFS
is only an extension of the actual system because many of the file
system work is done by NTFS.
Necessity
With the evolution of Internet and the information technologies,
working with big volumes of information has increasingly become more
common. Hard disks represent the first half of the storage for personal
information. They are commonly used to store personal contacts, work
documents, etc. These information items usually keep certain
relationship levels among them. So, when you work with a large number
of these items, it is very important to organize them and provide a
flexible search mechanism based on their properties and content.
Architecture
WinFS is a storage platform to organize, search and share a wide diversity of information.
Instead of a traditional tree in NTFS to organize information, WinFS
uses a direct acyclic graph of items (DAG). It is a set of stored items
and their relationships whose physical storage is a relational database
providing support to store any item hierarchy. Now it is possible to
find items according to the value of their properties and even to the
value of the properties of items related to them.The data-sharing
capacities of WinFS come with a set of services such us
synchronization, notification, a unified store and a common security
model. The integration of these services to other technologies like
Active Directory makes it possible for applications to share data in a
flexible way.
Conclusions
WinFS data model expresses a set of modern storage concepts featuring a
combination of the file system services and the relational system to
provide a new powerful and enhancing storage platform. This actually
elevates the file system conception to a higher level. The WinFS Item
may be expressed in XML, object-oriented or tabular manner which allows
the WinFS functionalities to be used in a variety of heterogeneous
environments. In addition to this, WinFS features a powerful API to
develop applications that use its potentialities. Due to its conception
WinFS data model represents a step forward in the evolution of file
systems and even of storage platforms.
