No to data loss

[mmcirvin]

John Siracusa has a proposal: dual RAID drives as standard equipment in consumer PCs. There are some arguments against in the comments (how do you market it, given that you can't claim it's as safe as real backups?) but we're at the point that it's worth thinking about. One poster suggests that Apple should make their Backup application standard equipment, but by all accounts I've heard, it sucks.

Comments

[graydon.livejournal.com]

I agree with this perspective, but would go one step further: I think computers (at the system-builder and UI level) should openly divide their storage between "public" and "private", where the private stuff is small (as you note, only a couple GB at worst), reliable, encrypted, and removable: stored in flash and carried away from the computer when you're done.

Your giant media files can stay on disk platters. You can spin up the disk when you want to watch TV or listen to music, and your machines can be more or less slobs about managing those media files: replicate them between machines or whatever (they are opaque and non-versionned anyways so you can use a content-addressed sync algorithm), don't worry about backups or data loss, etc.

The actually valuable excel/quicken/outlook/word files, IE/firefox settings and passwords etc. all easily fit on keyring flash.
This is all doable today (some people already do) but it should be made much easier, an OS-managed concept with a normal API (on windows for example, perhaps HKEY_CURRENT_USER or whatever subsection of the registry goes in the private area).