An Operating System that understands one thing: I do not want it to ever delete my data!

When it comes to the data on my machine, there is one rule that I follow: Never delete content that I have created myself!

I am trying to follow that rule by putting files that I made into a separate folder structure, onto a separate hard drive, or by copying it to gmail.

The latter sounds a bit silly, but to be honest: they all are! Why would I have to worry about not deleting content I created when there is one entity that knows for sure and should be able to take care of this on its own: the operating system.

After all, I am typing this text and the OS does know that. So why doesn't Windows go "uh, he's typing something. I'll see where he puts that and make sure it'll never get deleted. He'll like that."?

Now, will I ever write an OS? Probably not. All I can do is ask Paul or Steve to include this as a feature. Or I could get involved with Linux and develop something myself, maybe as part of gnome... I have to think about this...

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.