K-Drive is the file manager for Kal-OS. While most Linux flavor of PCs will use a folder hierarchy system to store files, Kal-OS will do something similar to Windows, and offer drive letters as an alternative method in navigating the files. The standard system will also be in place, and the drive letters is to make life easier for the user. This will allow the system to have 26 drives. Partitions will always have a numeric increment with each drive having a maximum of 10 partitions.
A: and B: will be SD card readers. Since Kal-OS is intended to be installed exclusively on KCI computers, this is not much of an issue since the P Series of computers will have an SD Card slot, and a micro-SD card slot in the SIM tray. In this regard, the SD card reader is A: and micro-SD card reader is B:. If there were 2 partitions in A:, then they will be identified as A.0: and A.1: This could look a little messy, but it would be recommended that partitions on drives should be kept to a minimum. The OS drive will always be C:. Any other internal drives will be continue to progress through the alphabet. After the internal drives are assigned, then network drives are assigned. This could be through a NAS server, or an online drive service such as Kal-Drive. Obviously, one has to be connected to that network for those drives to be accessible. After assigning networked drives, external USB plugged drives will be next. This will allow for a maximum number of 26 drives for the system. Computers running K: NAS will be able to merge multiple drives into one large drive. KCI will try to work with online file services such as DropBox to try to integrate their system into the OS without the need to acquire an application.
K-Drive can also support .tar, and .zip files for file compression, and file collection. In addition, directories can be locked with a PIN or password if anyone other than the owner is logged in. The philosophy today is the personal computer is personal, and usually used by a single person, however some households or work spaces may have multiple users using the same machine. With that in mind, there will be a way to lock certain files to keep other people’s eyes from prying into the files.
To help identify the structure of the file’s location, one will use / as the separator. This is different from Windows’ \ as the separator and intended to work with Linux based systems which is what Kal-OS is loosely based off of. Therefore, someone’s essay might be located at D:/users/frank/documents/essay.odt. D: is the second NVME drive of a 2 drive computer. users is where all users will be located at. frank is the user ID. documents is the folder in frank where the essay is located. essay.odt will be where the document is located.
During setup, the owner can designate a separate drive for personal files. This means if the computer has multiple NVME drives, then the owner can designate D: to store all of the user files. This means if something happened to the OS drive, then the user files will still remain intact. This does not counter the fact of a good backup system. This will make it easier to locate, and modify the files. To backup, one would use K-Backup, and select the letter which to backup to. As noted, this could be a networked drive, or an online drive.
If the user wishes to add a supporting online backup service, they will go to File > Add Service > Back-up Service, and provide their credentials. Once that happens, the OS will suggest assigning a letter to that resource therefore giving all of the connectivity without having to worry about where to find the folder. One example of supported services will be KCI’s Kal-Drive service which will range from 16GB – 16TB.