Where does HDFS stores data on the local file system

Question

I am new to Big Data & Hadoop. I have installed Cloudera distribution of Hadoop. I can view the HDFS web browser and I am also able to browse HDFS using ‘hdfs dfs -ls /’ command. But can anyone tell me how to find the physical location of files residing in HDFS?

Answer 1

First find the Hadoop directory present in /usr/lib. There you can find the etc/hadoop directory, where all the configuration files are present.

In that directory you can find the hdfs-site.xml file which contains all the details about HDFS. There you find 2 properties:

dfs.namenode.name.dir – tells where the namenode stores the metadata on the local filesystem.

dfs.datanode.data.dir – tells where the datanode stores the data on the local filesystem