I have a very large CIFS mount containing ~500,000 files on big slow 5400rpm drives. I only ever access it from my one laptop. Lately, I've been organizing it, which means lots of searching and renaming files. It's quite slow doing those searches over the network, and using an index program like fsearch isn't helpful, because it doesn't automatically reflect renames/moves/deletions, and isn't built for it like a file manager is.
I'm thinking of creating a local folder that mirrors the entire directory tree of the CIFS mount with symlinks. I could search through, rename, move, and delete the symlinks with full local speed, then write a script to compare the mirror and the original and apply the changes at a later time. This would also let me organize my files when offline/away from home, as a bonus.
But generating hundreds of thousands of symlinks seems like it might be a dumb, inefficient idea that someone else has already written a proper solution for. I'm new to the Linux/Unix-like world and not really aware of all the tools and filesystem features and so on out there. Is there some kind of CIFS-mount feature/tool out there that caches the directory tree offline (doesn't need to cache the actual file contents, just name/size/mtime) and allows for changes to be made?
What's the sensible thing to do in a case like this?
