COW should do wonders for performance, but COW with no data checksums would make me more nervous about reliability (only one copy of files to corrupt)
> but games have been played by CPU manufacturers
Plural? Intel and who else?What Apple added for the existing Time Machine on HFS+ was an extension of the Unix concept of hard links to files (where there is only one copy). They added hard links to directories. Generic Unix avoids doing that for a number of reasons.