Freenet integration to operating systems

Modern operating systems have the possibility to access the data stored on file system via drivers. This gives the opportunity to add additional file systems to operating system. Example AlexFS gives Linux the option to use a FTP server like a local hard disk.

Modern hard drives are so big, that there is often more than 2 time more capacity than needed. On the other hand, modern hard drives are crashing so often, there is a need of recovery. The best current way is to use RAID which means using two hard drives to span or mirror the data.

The ridiculous policy of my country brings an dramatic increase of the price of electrical power. We have at the 1 of July 2007 an increase up to 34%. Our government means, there is a need to reduce CO2 pollution to the half up to 2050. Worldwide! So a doubling of hard disk might not be acceptable in the future as standard solution for the big mas of users. If you want to protect your data from fire, vandalism, or being stolen, you need in minimum a second computer which will be synchronized to the first one, with an maximal distance to first one

Assuming we will split the hard disk in two partitions. Partition one is used by the operations system to store data in it's native format. But the file system driver will be called from an Freenet driver which is configured in the operating system as a driver.

This driver will recognize every update and stores a backup to Freenet. A big amount of data on end users pc's are some distributed stuff, like Linux, Windows, some game or applications what ever. As result from the content based storing model, Freenet will conserve space. This space can be used for advanced features like wapback of directories or as storage for Freenet based publication.

Access to Freenet public could be given via a special path like /freenet/world/KSK..... A publication can be easily done by storing the content in an other path like /freenet/public/index.html This may be better for simple users.

The content of the directory's backup to Freenet must be encrypted prior storing the content to Freenet to ensure the privacy of the user - The content within the files could not be found without knowing the content. It may be possible to create a system recovery disk, which makes a hard disk recovery only from knowing the long password.

Advantage over RAID systems:

• Saving of electrical power
• No need to operate a second computer to protect data from the risk of fire
• Recovery from older versions of the data
• Reduce of CO2 pollution
• No cost for backups if people have flatrate internet

Advantage over classical Freenet

• Quite more easy to use in relation to publish.
• Quite more easy to access content direct as files.
• Hiding of everyday cronjobs for publications.
• I assume a dramatic increase of legal traffic, makes it quite more hard to find some people who talk about something the government don't like about that.
• Given inverse passive requests, reliability for common files might be reasonable.

Major disadvantages:

• Lossy !! How useful is a backup system which is lossy ? It may however still be useful to be able to find a snapshot of your system at any given point in time, even though some files may not be retrievable and therefore you will have to go to hardcopy backup for.