1. Depends on your distributed storage. If you use clustered file system your argument is void. 2. While true I fail to see how that is relevant. What part of

1. Depends on your distributed storage. If you use clustered file system your argument is void. 2. While true I fail to see how that is relevant. What part of my described flow would be broken? 3. While true I again fail to see relevance. Are you just listing characteristics of symlinks? A field in a database could exist with a filepath pointing to a non-existing file as well. 4. Sure. I was describing how to avoid the counter and magic number, not the database.