.@ Tony Finch – blog


How long will it be before it becomes normal to archive everything? It's already normal in some situations, and I think that's increasing. It's been the norm in software development for a long time. There's an increase in append-mostly storage systems (i.e. append-only with garbage collection) which become never-delete systems if you replace the GC with an archiver. Maybe the last hold-outs for proper deletion will be high data volume servers...

Anyway, I feel like listing some interesting append-only and append-mostly systems. A tangent that I'm not going to follow is the rise of functional programming and immutability outside the field of storage. Many of these systems rely on cryptographic hashes to identify stuff they have already stored and avoid storing it again, making append-only much more practical.