Windows – Does a file system like WinFS actually exist

I don't think anyone really knows.

The most up to date information I can find is an interview with Quentin Clark in which he says that "most of WinFS either already has shipped, or will ship" just in other forms, such as part of SQL server or the ADO.net entity framework.

I personally suspect it was one of those projects that was poorly defined from the start. It was all things to all people and consequently could never fully realise all it's goals. It seems that all the research that went into the various different aspects of WinFS eventually grew into separate projects and became parts of other things.

You can see from this development timeline that it's been an ongoing project since 1990. that makes it one of the few software projects that actually been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever

[Edit: For completeness, here is some other info I found - WinFS Blog - Last updated June 2006. The last entry basically says WinFS was not dead but is no longer a separate product, it was planned to incorporate the tech into other products like SQL server and ado.net]

New information (May 2010):

I found this article which talks about the features of WinFS that have survived and live on in some form in Windows7.

As far as I know there is no standard. Here are a few ideas from my experience.

Set it up, never change it

This is were most companies fail. Nothing is worse than an ever changing file-system structure. If it is not possible to keep it constant then a pure file-system is just the wrong container to organize your information. Use a database or a Content Management System.

Use descriptive and consistent directory names

Nobody has the time to read a .filing file or anything else. If your directory names are not self explaining you probably are lost anyway.

Write a documentation for your directory structure

Write a document where you explain the role of every directory. Give lots of examples. Make it available to anyone who has to work with your structure, but don't believe anybody will read it. It should be more like a Bible to you. It's not easy to find an example for such a document, because obviously companies don't publish them. An example from open source software is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

If this sounds a little negative, it is. I've never seen a non-trivial repository based on a file system with more than five users work in the long run in practice. The problem is that whatever categories you'll set up, people will have completely different ideas about them. So to finally answer your questions:

Does such a thing exist?

No, I don't think so.

If not, why not?

In my opinion: For a small static hierarchy with a few users it's overkill. For a large changing hierarchy with many users it won't work because the idea of categories (=directories, folder) doesn't scale.

Do people think it's a worthwhile idea?

Hm, it's an interesting idea. To see if people will use it, someone has to implement it. Instead of a .filing file you could store that information in an alternate data stream (yes, folders can have ADS too). You could use extended attributes on Linux and OSX. The biggest problem would probably be to patch the file browsers.