Throughout our life, we all continue to generate content, whether that's writing documents, taking photos, writing comments online, liking our friends' posts on social networks, etc. Our content is typically spread between a mix of different companies' servers ("The Cloud") and your own hardware (laptops, phones, etc). All of these things are prone to failure: companies go out of business, change ownership, or kill products. Personal harddrives fail, laptops and phones are dropped.

It would be nice if we were a bit more in control. At least, it would be nice if we had a reliable backup of all our content. Once we have all our content, it's then nice to search it, view it, and directly serve it or share it out to others (public or with select ACLs), regardless of the original host's policies.

Camlistore is a system to do all that.