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FileCabinet Technical Roadmap

FileCabinet's roadmap is organized around verification, usability, legacy support, and federation.

1. Deterministic Vault (Phase 1)​

Focuses on absolute trust in storage and catalog schema validation.

  • Standardize default ingestion to SHA-256 for all catalog profiles.
  • Add KangarooTwelve and Skein support for modern hashing alternatives.
  • Implement catalog backup validation verification (validating JSON exports before overwrite).
  • Add support for compressed ZIP vault package exports (--zip command).
  • Implement incremental validation scanning (only verification of items modified since last run).

2. Archival Maturity (Phase 2)​

Focuses on long-term stewardship, durability of physical media, and bit rot protection.

  • Relocate Vault Health into a dedicated, isolated tab workspace.
  • Maintain separate read paths for large files to avoid UI lockups.
  • Introduce file redundancy checking (cross-referencing vault catalog backups on secondary drives).
  • Implement active bit rot scanning schedules with low-priority background threads.
  • Define physical vault replication profiles (auto-replicating vault folders to backup targets).

3. Daily-Use Workflows (Phase 3)​

Focuses on sorting, curation, and catalog cleanup.

  • Group hash configuration options by purpose in Settings (Recommended, Modern, Legacy, Compatibility).
  • Implement multi-select bulk actions in the Vault Health workspace.
  • Build a guided Duplicate Resolution wizard (comparing files with identical hashes to select what to keep or merge).
  • Add custom tagging templates for typical intake categories (e.g. "Receipts", "Dependencies", "Retro ROMs").
  • Build an automatic import monitor (watching a selected folder like Downloads and prompting for FileCabinet ingestion).

4. Legacy & Federation (Phase 4)​

Focuses on multi-drive scaling, catalog merging, and offline coordination.

  • Implement catalog merging (importing records from an external vault's catalog backup).
  • Design multi-drive federation (allowing one master UI to query across disconnected drives/vaults).
  • Support export catalog schemas in open, human-readable formats (e.g. YAML, CSV alongside JSON).

5. Testing & Quality Gates​

Our standard for stability:

  • Unit Testing: Expand test coverage for core models and ingestion paths under FileCabinet.Tests.
  • CLI Testing: Build automated script integration tests to verify exit codes (e.g., 0 for OK, 2 for audit failure).
  • SonarQube Quality Gate: Keep code smells, security vulnerabilities, and bugs checked via SonarCloud integrations.