00 — Product Vision

From the Burrow™ specification set.

00 — Product Vision

Mission

Burrow™ is a lightweight, local-first macOS utility that manages the lifecycle of personal files across internal storage, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, and removable storage.

It is a storage librarian, archivist, and backup auditor, not an automated junk cleaner.

Core Questions

Burrow™ should allow the user to confidently answer:

  • What do I have?
  • Where is it?
  • Why is storage being consumed?
  • Which files are exact duplicates?
  • Which files are good archival candidates?
  • Which data is merely synchronized versus actually backed up?
  • When was each important collection last successfully verified?

Principles

Local First

Metadata, hashes, rules, and history remain local by default. File contents are not uploaded for analysis.

Read Before Write

Discovery and analysis always precede mutation.

Backup Before Destruction

Important source files should not be removed until another copy has been verified when applicable.

Sync Is Not Backup

iCloud/OneDrive synchronization is modeled independently from backup protection.

Explainability

Every recommendation must include its evidence and rationale.

Reversibility

Where cleanup is eventually supported, reversible actions such as moving to Trash are preferred over permanent deletion.

Storage Providers — Initial

  1. macOS internal storage
  2. iCloud Drive
  3. OneDrive
  4. External/removable volumes

Future possibilities include network storage and additional cloud providers, but they are not v1 requirements.

Major Capabilities

  1. Discover & Inventory
  2. Analyze & Clean
  3. Archive
  4. Backup & Verify
  5. Protection/Health Reporting

Product Phases

Version Capability
0.1 Discovery & Inventory
0.2 Duplicate Analysis
0.3 Backup
0.4 Archive
0.5 Managed Cleanup
0.6 Backup Health & Policy
1.0 Stable integrated release

v0.1 Required Outcomes

The user can:

  • see all configured storage locations;
  • understand capacity and utilization;
  • scan selected roots;
  • find large and old files;
  • see cloud/local distinctions;
  • inspect inventory findings without changing files.

Release 0.1 protection states are limited to LOCAL_ONLY, SYNCED_ONLY, and UNKNOWN. Synchronized cloud files must not be described as backed up or protected.

Correction (2026-09-06): This document previously listed “identify exact duplicates” as a v0.1 outcome. That was inconsistent with docs/10-IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN.md and the approved Jira plan. Exact duplicate detection, hashing, cross-storage duplicate analysis, and duplicate reclaimable-space analysis belong to Release 0.2. Jira: VLT-7.

v0.2 Required Outcomes

The user can:

  • identify exact duplicates;
  • see conservative reclaimable-space analysis for exact duplicates;
  • inspect explainable recommendations without changing files.

v0.1 Explicit Exclusions

No delete, move, archive, backup, automated cleanup, cloud mutation, or synchronization changes. No exact-duplicate hashing or duplicate-group analysis.

Long-Term Success

The product succeeds when the user can clean and reorganize storage without fear because Burrow™ can explain where files are, what copies exist, and whether important data is protected.