What is an electronic folder structure?

What is the file and folder structure of music on a server for Google Music?

• We all have our own ways of organizing the music on our personal hard disks. For example: "<Music Folder>/<Artist>/<Album> <Year>/<Track Number>. <Artist> - <Track Name>.<Extension>" How do engineers at Google set up the file and folder structure of music tracks on their servers so that they are organized and can be easily found when requested?

• Answer:

  Folder structure is irrelevant here. In order to efficiently perform a lookup of arbitrary complexity and find the piece of information you're looking for, you're going to need some sort of database. For what it's worth, actual media files might be all thrown together in a single folder, each file havin a name such as 6ba7b810-9dad-11d1-80b4-00c04fd430c8, because all the information for 6ba7b810-9dad-11d1-80b4-00c04fd430c8 is stored in the database under 6ba7b810-9dad-11d1-80b4-00c04fd430c8. Or there might not be a file at all, just a blob of binary data stored directly in the database -- whatever works better. In any case, both the media and the metadata database (which is also stored as regular files - only they're most likely opaque binary data which is only readable by a compatible database program) are most likely split into chunks a single server can handle, and then replicated for redundancy across multiple server farms in Google's datacenters around the globe.