If you run a home lab or manage large datasets, you’ve hit this wall: NVMe drives are fast but too expensive to hoard data on. Hard drives or cloud buckets are cheap, but they are slow and a pain to manage manually.
The enterprise world solves this with HSM Hierarchical Storage Managementautomatically shuffling colddata to slow storage while keeping a transparent stub on the fast drive. But enterprise HSMs cost thousands of dollars and lock your data in proprietary black boxes.
I wanted this for Linux, for free. So, I started building HuskHoard, an opensource data tiering engine.
My first thought, like almost every Linux developer building a virtual filesystem, was to use FUSE . But I quickly realized FUSE was the wrong tool for the job. Here is why I abandoned it, and how I used the Linux fanotify API and Rust to build a transparent, zero overhead archiving engine.
The Problem with FUSE
