[em-bee]

The reality is that most things don't actually modify files, even text editors tend to save a new version and rename over the top.

it is essentially copy-on-write exposed to the user level. the only issue is that this breaks hard links, so tools that rely on that are going to break. but yes, custom code should be easy to adapt.

[jleahy]

Yes hard links aren't supported in TernFS. They would actually be really difficult to make work in this kind of sharded metadata design as they would need to be reference counted and all the operations would need to go via the CDC. It wouldn't really have matched with the design philosphy of simple and predictable performance.

[em-bee]

well, that's at least consistent. if hard-links aren't even supported, you can't break hard-links by replacing a file with a new one through renaming either.