Reasons for LFS

Disk volumn is not the criticle point any more. 500G only costs $100.

The harddriver has developed from ATA to SATA, whose speed is now competitive to the server level data access SCSI.

Now problems come as how to well manage large data, how to well index the data and fast search the data, how to support large number of directories and large size of files. All circle around file management.

LFS is targeting at roll back, backup and recovery, involving maintaining multiple copies of edited version. So how to most efficiently save the space and quickly access the right spot is a good topic.

Also IBM proposed a paper on maintaining multiple versions of updated applications, trying to solve version dependency which is also a good hint to be adopted into LFS on the application's layout. Besides that, CVS may be a good example of maintaining multiple version. Its implementation details are good to know.