USBflashdrev

USBflashdrev is a conceptual software interface and protocol designed to provide revision-aware access to USB flash drives. It aims to enable versioned data management, atomic updates, and improved integrity on portable flash storage by associating data blocks with revision metadata and using a consistent semantics across platforms.

The architecture typically envisages a host-side component—such as a kernel driver, a user-space library, or a portable runtime—that speaks USBflashdrev to the device. In devices that support firmware updates, an optional device-side firmware module may implement the revision ledger and commit protocol. Data is organized into blocks or extents, each carrying revision tags and checksums, with a journaling-like mechanism to recover after power loss.

Core features include per-block revision tagging, a revision ledger, atomic commit operations, integrity checksums, crash-safe recovery, and optional encryption. The protocol may expose operations for reading, writing, creating revisions, rolling back, and auditing change history. Wear-leveling awareness can be integrated to minimize wear on multi-write devices.

Compatibility requires at least a standard USB Mass Storage interface; full benefits assume either host-side support or device firmware support. Without such support, USBflashdrev behaves as a conventional USB storage device, with no revision management. Typical use cases include embedded systems, data-logging with versioned archives, secure backups, and testing environments that require reproducible storage states.

The term USBflashdrev appears in discussions of portable storage reliability and versioned storage abstractions and does not represent a widely adopted standard as of now. See also USB mass storage, flash memory, revision control, journaling file systems.