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Only the block where the byte resides. A block is typically 512b to 4096b. (So it's not that unlike a normal drive, where you also have to rewrite an entire sector even if just a byte changed)

Venti doesn't know about files, it only knows about blocks of data. It's a key/value store where the key is sha-1 and the value is a block(blob) of data.

The filesystem running on top of Venti will ask Venti to store the new block where you changed the byte and the filesystem will update the metadata that assembles all blocks to a file.



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