Unified User Data Storage

Posted on October 14, 2003 @ 10:20 in Software

This weekend I reinstalled my dad's computer. I did the whole data backup, format, reinstall dance and song routine, and apart from a couple of small snags along the way — copying files from cd-rom to harddisk leaves their read-only bit set — I thought everything went pretty okay. It turns out, we did lose some data: his list of important fax numbers that he had stored in the fax program. The fax program probably stores this little database somewhere in it's own program directory, with a non-obvious file name. I backed up everything I found in "My Documents," in "%username%/Application Data," and ran through all the other directories, but I missed the fax number list.

This got me thinking: why don't operating systems provide a "Unified User Data Storage"? I imagine this UUDS system to be some sort of central repository, not just of all of the user's documents, but also of all of the settings and databases of all the programs that the user happens to use. It would be accessible through a system level API, the storage format would probably be XML based, and the OS would keep everything together. Applications running on this OS would be forced to talk to the OS for storing any sort of data and nothing just gets written where the individual application thinks is all right. Access to the UUDS would be tiered and when the user accesses the data storage through the user interface, it would only show the user the documents. Access to application data would be restricted to applications and administrators. Having everything in one place — and only one place — would make backing up a system's essential data a breeze. It would also make data portability and roaming profiles really simple and robust I imagine.

One can always dream...

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