The FILTR is a program intended to be useful over the course of my lifetime. It combines the features of a backup utility, an archiving/version-control utility and a document management utility to create an effective and simple-to-use personal document management system.
Instead of safeguarding a set of files on an individual computer as most backup programs do, it is designed to manage and maintain a personal virtual filesystem independent of any single computer, all or part of which can be projected onto any of the several computers I use now or may use in the future.
The FILTR allows management of files and directories by project and edit time. I can maintain a subset of my personal filesystem on a particular computer, edit the files there, and then upload the changes back to the master archive. All changes are preserved as file deltas, and any previous state of a single file, a directory, a project spanning several files and directories, or the entire archive can be reconstituted.
I can maintain several subsets of the archive on several different computers over extended periods, then merge everything back into one at my convenience.
I can perform simple procedures via drag-and-drop in the included GUI file manager, or complex selections using wildcards and advanced settings with dynamically-generated configuration files.
I can combine archiving with deployment, for example I can set up a sub-directory so that every time I save a file into it, a copy of the file is uploaded to an FTP site at the same time.
In case some files of interest can't be easily integrated into the personal filesystem tree (like Firefox profile files), I can make OS-independent "symbolic links" from arbitrary locations into the personal filesystem space, and manage changes to them like any other in the archive. I can thus make config information portable across computers and operating systems, so that any computer I sit down to shortly behaves like "my" computer.
This is the program I wish someone had handed to me when I started working with computers twenty years ago, so I could have enjoyed the continuity to organize and polish my work over the whole course of my efforts, rather than spending so much time distracted by trying to prevent catastrophic loss and wondering about lost and abandoned information.