Perkeep is a system for treating personal data as a lifelong, content-addressed archive rather than an application-specific database. Everything—photos, messages, files, logs—is stored as immutable blobs identified by cryptographic hashes. Applications become views over data, not owners of it, and data remains stable even as software changes.

Its importance lies in the question it asks rather than the scale it reached: what if your data outlived every app? Perkeep reframed personal computing as stewardship over time, anticipating many later conversations around data ownership, portability, and permanence in a world of short-lived platforms.