Mac OS X network filesystem with local Most Recently Used (MRU) cache?

Question

I don’t know if this is possible to setup a Mac OS X network filesystem with local Most Recently Used (MRU) cache but here is the problem I'm looking to solve:

1. My local computer has a 128G hard drive, and I have a network mounted drive containing about 1TB of data.
2. Most of the data is old or infrequently used.
3. While I am attached to the network share, everything is fine however when I'm on the road I don't have access to that share. I would like to have a most-recently-used local copy of the files (say touched in the past 6 months, up to 40G total data).
4. When I attach back to the network, the local file system would sync back up with the network file system.
5. Ideally, it would all be transparent (i.e.: when the drive is attached, everything shows up, when I'm detatched, either the non-most-recently-used files are gone, or there are place-holder links that give some sort of warning when accessed.
6. File access checks for the local copy if present, then falls back to network if not.

It looks like the CacheFS hits a lot of those point, but it does not appear to have an Mac OS X port. Are there any good alternatives to achieve that goal?

Answer 1

As I have been informed about the same kind of thing with Windows, the current best solution is: Run Linux in a VM and then use Linux with cachefilesd.

However, CacheFS will not allow you to access the network drive when you do not otherwise have access to the network drive.

For MRU files, I would suggest something like DropBox, or Google Drive to hold the data in the cloud, and just have your laptop sync, and some desktop sync as well.

This is as close to transparent as you are likely to get.