US Patent 10031919 Management of access to data distributed across multiple computing devices

Methods, systems and apparatus for a distributed data environment in which data can be seamlessly accessed from remote computing devices are disclosed. For a given user having multiple computing devices, a personal distributed data bank can be formed from data storage capacities resident at the multiple computing device. The given user can access data on any of the multiple computing devices without knowing on which of the multiple computing devices the data resides. In one embodiment, an index for the user's data within the personal distributed data bank can be provided to facilitate searching, browsing and accessing of user data by the given user.