I dabble in "life storage" and your comment made me think that some sort of executable shipped alongside backup locations to read the data, if in some deduplicated backup form, seems valuable.
Eg Camlistore/Perkeep had the premise of using JSON to store data. However some random person isn't going to write code to parse all that data, pull files out, etc. A lifeboat .exe might be interesting.
Though doing it in the most simple, least configurable, least breakable way seems.. necessary. Yea some baked in UI would be cool, but more moving parts means less likely to work.
Eg Camlistore/Perkeep had the premise of using JSON to store data. However some random person isn't going to write code to parse all that data, pull files out, etc. A lifeboat .exe might be interesting.
Though doing it in the most simple, least configurable, least breakable way seems.. necessary. Yea some baked in UI would be cool, but more moving parts means less likely to work.