Persistent Disk Based Caching With File Modification Tracking

via “state tracking and cache coherency management”

Git for data scientists - manage your code and data together

Unique: Uses a local state database tracking file modification times and hashes to enable fast change detection without re-hashing, integrated with the CacheManager for efficient incremental execution. State is stored in .dvc/tmp/dvc-state and consulted before expensive hash computations.

vs others: More efficient than always re-hashing (like some Make-based systems) but less reliable than content-based detection (can miss external file modifications); similar to Git's index approach but adapted for data files