The data protection in pOS v0.0.1
may, 12 2001

pOS will feature two data protection mechanisms
to prevent data in memory and on disk drives
from loss.

Data in memory can be protected through a mechanism
called "volatile memory protection". This protection
is activated when any process/task hangs and needs
to be killed. After the kernel has removed the task(s)
from the task schedule, all memory dynamically allocated
will be written to files containing the raw memory data.
Applications could integrate functions that can reimport
those raw-data and restore them to the original state.


Data on disk drives is protected through a mechanism
called "overwritten file restore". This mechanism
is integrated into the filesystem driver and therefore
is probably not available on all filesystems. The mechanism
keeps back old files on the filesystem when they are over-
written with altered versions of the file. This is done
by writing the content of the new file to other free areas
on the disk and marking the blocks of the old file as free.
But the filesystem will retain the block information of the
old file and restore the old file when requested.


Both mechanism will increase the data integrity of the operating
system and will enable it to handle important data on a high
safety level.