Humans Need Permanent Data Storage

The user story for data storage is as simple as its solution is complex:

I want all my data to be collected automatically, stored permanently, and be available on any device.

The best consumer facing companies for this problem, like Apple and Google, give you a facsimile of a solution here, but it falls apart on examination.

Collected Automatically: Only the devices and apps you use within a company's ecosystem, like Apple or Google, can be automatically collected. Users inevitably use some outlier app or device and are left to figure out how to collect that data themselves or merge it with their other data.

Stored Permanently: While Google, Apple, and others have an impressive redundancy architecture for data, their main vulnerability is their business model. If a company goes bankrupt or changes their goals so that data storage is no longer a priority, you'd likely have to extract it from their servers before some end of life deadline. After that it would be gone.

Also, as technology advances, we need methods of becoming agnostic to formats and storage mediums. It does you no good if your data survives, but in an unreadable format.

Available On Any Device: Again, not if the device you want to use is in a different ecosystem than where the data you want to access is stored. Also, there's not a good way to access your data without an internet connection.

The state of play here is the result of many of the smartest people in the world spending years of their lives and billions of dollars on this problem. And it still falls short of providing a comprehensive solution.

This is where Re-Public has set its sights. Over the next year we will be evaluating open source solutions that exist, like remoteStorage, Perkeep, Fission, and WNFS, and figuring out how to make these backend tools effortless to use for Re-Public users, if they even realize they're using them at all.

In the end, as a user, you will be able to:

• Setup auto-importers to continuously bring any remote data source into your archive (Twitter, Strava, Amazon, Google, etc.)
• Search across all your data
• Store your data in a variety of standard formats to future proof access over the next decades and centuries
• Store your data in a variety of locations around the world to mitigate against catastrophic events, be they political, technical, or atmospheric

As Perkeep founder Brad Fitzpatrick has stated, we want to think about passing down our photos, writings, medical records, and other information down to our children and their children's children. We have been trained to think of data as temporary due to a variety of temporary businesses being in charge of that data up until now.

Your data should be yours. It should be permanent. We have the technology to achieve this today but it's difficult to use and all the pieces don't interoperate. Re-Public is not going to build THE solution. But we'll help bring all the pieces together and make them usable and understandable for non-technical people. We'll build the connective tissue where needed.

If this sounds like an exciting challenge, come join us. We're an open community of volunteers but eventually will have funding and revenue to support a core team of developers.

Cover image by benjamin lehman on Unsplash