Hard Drives with a Built-In UNDO Feature.
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 10/28/2014 1:00:00 AM
I'm spoiled. I use a virtual PC running on a Mac. Even if I totally mess up, I can roll back to where I was yesterday. Most people can't. A hard drive with Undo features built-in would solve a lot of problems.
To be clear, I know there are some software solutions out there. Apple has Time Machine, and some third party programs were on the market more than a decade ago to allow you to undo changes to your hard drive, but the truth is, nothing is better than a hardware solution.
Because most people only use a fraction of the space of today's massive hard drives, it would be quite easy for a storage company to build a simple undo feature into their storage solutions. The premise is simple. Without using any special software, the hard drive would create a change tracking file as soon as it is turned on or plugged in. From that point on, any data that is written is written into the change tracking file, leaving the original untouched.
The functionality can either be built into the drive itself, or into a USB enclosure, which means a company that doesn't manufacture the drives could build the undo feature into the controller inside the enclosure. As an external enclosure, you wouldn't need any software, just a button or two on the outside.
At it's most basic level, without using any software on the computer, it would be possible for the drive to have one button that you could hit that would undo every change and revert back to the original... plus a second button that essentially says "I'm Okay... Commit the changes".
A more sophisticated version would have a few extra buttons, giving you the ability to store more than one change tracking file, also known as a Snapshot. For example, by having 4 snapshots of the prior 4 sessions, it could potentially revert to a version up to 4 sessions ago. As the 5th session is started, the oldest would be committed.
With a few extra buttons and possibly a small LCD display for easy navigation, you could keep as many snapshots as you have room for before the oldest session would be committed. This would essentially be a hardware based Time Capsule, that would work on any operating system, and it wouldn't require any software.
If the functionality was built into the drive mechanism, instead of an external enclosure, the drive would allow you to not only undo changes to regular files, but to the operating system itself, which would eliminate the chance of damage from a virus.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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