Microsoft Windows Vista Unveiled

Windows Vista was supposed to be the operating system that finally realized Microsoft's long-sought dream of a major file system breakthrough. Windows Vista was supposed to include WinFS (Windows Future Storage), a file-storage subsystem that runs on NTFS. WinFS not only uses SQL Serverrelated technology to create sophisticated indexes of a wide variety of datadocuments, images, email messages, and so onbut it also leverages the power of XML to create metadata schemas for your data. Metadata is information that describes data. For example, you could implement a Tags property to hold keywords. If you then applied the tag Budget2006 to all your data related to this year's budgetExcel workbooks, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Access databases, Outlook email messages, and so onWinFS would not only index all this content, but it also would relate them together based on the common Tags metadata.

It's really the Holy Grail of file systems, but, alas, Microsoft had to drop support for WinFS in Vista so it could ship in a reasonable timeframe. Not that WinFS is dead: On the contrary, a group at Microsoft is still working on this technology, and Microsoft has promised that WinFS will be available for Windows Vista sometime after Vista hits the shelves.

In the meantime, you'll have to content yourself with the changes that Microsoft made to Vista's implementation of the NTFS file system. As you'll see in this chapter, Vista has cobbled quite a few WinFS-like features onto NTFS, including some support for metadata and advanced searching.

Overall, what we're seeing in Vista is a move away from the venerable drive-and-directory storage model that has been the only way of doing things in the PC world since MS-DOS 1.0. For the past quarter-century, we've been taught to think of a file as something that resides, say, on hard disk 0, in partition C:, in the directory/folder named Data. This location-based storage model worked more or less efficiently in the days of 100MB hard drives, but now 100GB drives are common, and mainstream terabyte (1000GB) drives are just around the corner. We fill these massive disks, of course (remember Parkinson's Law of Data), so these days we're dealing with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 times the amount of data that we were 10 years ago.

But it's not just the amount of data to deal withit's also the number of places where that data is stored. If you have a floppy drive, a couple of hard disks, several partitions on each hard disk, a couple of optical drives, and a memory card reader, your system could easily use 15 drive letters. A well-used system might have more than 10,000 folders scattered across those drives. And, of course, plenty of data is stored in hundreds of email folders, RSS feeds, address books, and calendars. With numbers like these, it's clearly time to look for an alternative to location-based file storage. Vista is the first step toward that new storage mechanism, and this chapter gives you a preview of what's new.