Apple Wants To Store Your History In the Cloud

bizwriter writes "Most online backup is about keeping the latest and greatest version of what resides on a device, whether a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Three recent patent filings suggest that Apple has a super version of backup on its mind. Someone would be able to go into an application (like iTunes or the App Store), find what material was available at a previous time, and recover any or all of what once was there without having to use a separate recovery program."

Comments

Cool patents, bro.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I know that "in the cloud" is the hip thing these days; but I'm a bit fuzzy on how this differs in any patentable way from versioning file systems that go back at least as far as VMS, and almost any network backup product that provides differential backups(which is virtually all of them).

Even more specifically, precisely this sort of 'network-accessed version/time view' of documents is what pretty much any IDE does when you point it at a supported revision control system. Complete history of your project, all in 'app', delivered locally or over the network, or clustered, or what have you. Similar, albeit expensive and somewhat niche, stuff can be had for word processing among legal types.

Now, from a user experience perspective, more power to Apple if they can bring the benefits of a revision control model to other applications in a way intuitive enough for people who wouldn't know a revision control system if it bit them. That is the sort of thing that they are good at, and the sort of thing that they can charge a premium for.

Patent worthy, though? Srsly?

Wait...

[Locke2005]

So first, any normal business practice becomes patentable if you add the words "on a computer" to it. Now this: anything you do on a computer (e.g. backup) becomes patentable if you and the words "in the cloud" to it??? WTF is wrong with our patent system?