PolicyFS - open-source FUSE filesystem for self-hosted media storage
I built PolicyFS for a very specific problem: apps like Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, and Bazarr love to scan libraries on their own schedules, which means HDDs keep waking up even when nobody is actually watching anything.
PolicyFS presents multiple disks (SSDs + HDDs) as a single mountpoint, but for HDDs metadata lookups are served from SQLite instead of touching the disks directly. In practice, that means scans and directory listings can be handled without walking HDDs. Only actual file access needs the physical disk.
What it supports:
- glob-based routing rules for read/write targets
- SSD-first writes
- a built-in mover to migrate colder files to HDD by age, size, or disk usage
- deferred delete/rename logging for indexed HDD paths, so metadata mutations don't force immediate spin-up
For home media, the intended setup is pfs + SnapRAID: flexible disk expansion, practical parity protection, and HDDs that can actually stay asleep until playback.
Even if spindown is not your main goal, pfs can still work as a transparent SSD write tier in front of larger HDD storage.
Single binary, one YAML config, includes systemd units. Not intended for databases, Docker volumes, or workloads that are heavy on fsync or mmap.
Homepage: https://policyfs.org