Recoverability preservation: A measure of last resort

Recoverability preservation is the property of a system to maintain recoverability even when it does not maintain correctness; recoverability, in turn, is the property of a system to avoid failure, even when system states have errors. In this paper, we argue that fault tolerance techniques could be more streamlined, less intrusive, and more effective if they focused on the criterion of recoverability preservation instead of the traditional criterion of correctness preservation. To this effect, we briefly introduce, motivate, illustrate, and analyze the concept of recoverability preservation, then we explore some of its applications.