OSNews

"1. How will I backup this kind of store? I can imagine an enterprise will have a backup server that replicates local stores, but what about the home user?"
There is a synchronisation manager built into the shell. You can select certain files to be kept consistent between various other WinFS systems. This is for colaberative working, document management type scenarios.
Also since the file system is NTFS underneath I expect traditional imaging techniques will work as usual. Backup software vendors will no doubt update their products to fully support longhorn. MS may be working on this themselves, I think backup operations are part of their "PC Satisfaction" product they are currently testing.


"2. How will I restore these kinds of backups? Will I be able to restore this data on my other computers? What if my other computers are running OS X or BSD or Linux?"
Being NTFS, actual files will still be readable under linux with the exisiting NTFS driver. The database meta-data and relationships will not be accessible and some of the files might be hard to find since they may not be stored in hierachical folders and may have filenames generated at random. eg GUIDs

"3. Lots of file formats contain metadata, e.g. a Word document's author information or an mp3's id3 tags. If I transfer a file from WinFS to another system, how will that file's metadata get transfered?"
There will be lots of import filters that will read the existing metadata, (MP3 ID3 Tags, Jpeg EXIF data, Office file metadata) and add it to the WinFS database. When the database stored metadata is updated these changes can be propergated back into the files.
You can create custom filters for reading and writing metadata into your own proprietary file formats. With metadata stored both in the file and the database it is preserved when being transfered between systems.