Perkeep compared with Wiki

We imagine a frequently asked question is how Perkeep compares to Wiki. page

# Longevity Remember that Perkeep's goal is to keep your data for your entire life. Let's call that 100 years. Or longer, if you want to pass your data down generations. That influences a number of aspects of Perkeep's design. I think Wiki shares these goals.

# Software, not a service Perkeep is software that you can run on your own machine, or that you can run on the cloud yourself, but it is not a hosted service by a for-profit company. Many companies host your files, but we wouldn't count on any one of them to stay in business or not change business models in 100 years. Sites often die and lose user data. Many services start free to get rapid growth but later close when they don't achieve enough growth, or don't find a business model that works and their investors aren't happy. By paying for keeping your own data, you avoid the uncertainty of what other people (companies, investors) are going to do to your data. Wiki also suggests belonging to a federation, here your best articles will be forked and replicate rather than making backups.

# Open source In addition to being software instead of a service, Perkeep and Wiki are open source software. That means that even if computers are much different in 100 years, you'll still have hope of you or somebody else updating Perkeep and Wiki to run on them. Or at least you'll be able to read the code and figure out the on-disk representation, if Perkeep's verbose, data-archaeology-paranoid and Wiki json formats leave any doubt. It also means many people can contribute, instead of one company that might go out of business or change priorities.

# Perkeep: Objects, not files Perkeep's data model is based primarily on nameless objects. Perkeep can model traditional files with filenames and a POSIX filesystem, but it can just as happily represent a tweet or a "like" with no name. Perkeep is built as something you casually throw data into and don't worry about organizing too much. It's all indexed so you can search for it later. Or you can give it a name (or multiple names!) if you prefer, but you can do that whenever you want later. You can even have objects or files with multiple parent containers. Many other products & services assume a file-centric view of the world. Perkeep takes the view that files are becoming less important over time. People care about backing up and searching their content, not their files. (Note that iOS went about 10 years before having a file browser or any concept of files.) Because Perkeep can handle objects so well, we can import your tweets or likes or check-ins or other social media content in a more natural representation, rather than inventing files and names for everything.

Camlistore (renamed to Perkeep) author, Brad Fitzpatrick commented more on Hacker News thread

# Wiki: IDK...see Ward's retrospective thoughts...