On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 6:38 PM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
Ben Coman wrote
Unless your requirements *specifically* need identical files to be maintained as duplicates, I would strongly consider using something content based like MD5 or SHA
Interesting... There should not be any duplicates. What's the advantage over UUID?
This... "move to another OS and continue generating [file-ids] with another VM? " An sha-hash intrinsically represents THE content (it is *always* the same no matter who/where/how its calculated), whereas a UUID is a randomly generated label assigned to the content. also, depending on use-case, it may facilitate... * easy to verify whether the file contents have changed. * periodic checking of backups/restores for file corruption (including by external tools without reference to indexes maintained by your Application Image. * facilitate revision control, if you come across a file whose filename doesn't match its contents-sha-hash, then you know its ancestor content by its current file-id. And for my own use case "some day".... I know have many duplicate files scattered amongst many adhoc backups. For example, over ten years several cycles of upgrading to a new PC where the quick-safe path taken was to copy the old PC hard drive to a subfolder on the new PC hard drive, but the old hard went into a box now with a dozen friends, plus duplication of many old small backups media (floppy, ZIP-Media, tape) that it wold help to consolidate onto several of todays large media. cheers -ben