You may normally boot from a hard drive, but you may sometimes need to boot from a floppy disk, a USB memory key, a CD or DVD, or a network.

In the current Vanish prototype, however, the network's computer purge their memory every eight hours to simulate the key loss that would occur on P2P networks.

The key is then divided into dozens of pieces and sent out over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks - the same ones where music and movie files are traded every day.