Single-Snapshot File System Analysis

Abstract

Metadata snapshots are a common method for gaining insight into file systems due to their small size and relative ease of acquisition. Since they are static, most researchers have used them for relatively simple analyses such as file size distributions and age of files. We hypothesize that it is possible to gain much richer insights into file system and user behavior by clustering features in metadata snapshots and comparing the entropy within clusters to the entropy within natural partitions such as directory hierarchies. We discuss several different methods for gaining deeper insights into metadata snapshots, and show a small proof of concept using data from Los Alamos National Laboratories. In our initial work, we see evidence that it is possible to identify user locality information, traditionally the purview of dynamic traces, using a single static snapshot.