Computers crash, it happens. You can try and prepare yourself with an external hard drive and manually backing things up, or paying for a backup service to put some files on a server somewhere. If you use Windows you might use the integrated backup features to automate backing up of certain files, and if you use Mac OS you might have a Time Machine to secure your backups.
Another major issue is when you use multiple computers, if you have a desktop and a laptop, a mobile device, netbook, tablet, or mobile phone - two of any instantly make you wish for some kind of order to the chaos. There are some applications that can help, Dropbox is a great service if you have a small amount of stuff you want to sync up, but dropbox can't be used for backups.
If sharing files and folders with people is also a huge pain, Windows has tried to solve this through many different solutions, and most of the time computers only allow sharing for local network computers, but lets face it, we're a mobile age, we can work remotely, we shouldn't be tired down and we still need to collaborate with our files. Dropbox again helps here, and many other services like Google Docs, version control systems, and more touch on this issue.
But let's face it, simplicity would be best here. To fix this, NetOS is considering implementation of a totally redesigned file system - now, we're not talking about getting rid of NTFS or anything, we want to keep support everywhere, what we mean is that all your files can be synced off site - version control is kept letting you undelete anything, see your edits to a file, and more. All files stored off site will be encrypted using a private key file, giving you complete security.
That instantly takes care of backups.
As for syncing your files and sharing with others, every folder on your computer can be shared, invite yourself on another computer or invite your friends and coworkers to a folder and your files will be synced through a client-to-client system. Meaning that you are not dependent on another server to host the files, instead, each person being shared with holds a HEAD file containing revision history, and the master user (the person who starts to invite people) holds the revisions. The master user can then have those revisions stored on their own secure server to save space. Each member of the shared folder will always have the most recent files, so if you edit something it's sent out to the other members, and their local file is updated.
If you have two computers, you can have selected folders be synced by logging into your own server holding your backups and selecting the folders or you can choose to sync up your entire home directory.
Now for simplicity, you do not actually need to have your own server, a service will be offered by NetOS to use cloud-storage to offer peace of mind for secure and safe backups and revisions of your files. Pricing for the space is not decided, but you can be sure we're aiming for something close to what Google Docs charges for extra storage - this will likely be a main source of income for the NetOS core development, as we want to keep NetOS free and open source, we need to somehow have a way to get a stable development.
And now, if you're computer ever breaks, you just bootup your new NetOS install or use the NetOS app on a different operating system and you have complete and transparent access to all your files again.
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