Isolated Storage

Isolated storage is a data storage mechanism that provides isolation and safety by defining standardized ways of associating code with saved data. Standardization provides other benefits as well. Administrators can use tools designed to manipulate isolated storage to configure file storage space, set security policies, and delete unused data. With isolated storage, your code no longer needs unique paths to specify safe locations in the file system and data is protected from other applications that only have isolated storage access. "Hard-coded" information that indicates where an application's storage area is located is unnecessary.

Using isolated storage enables partially trusted applications to store data in a manner that is controlled by the computer's security policy. This is especially useful for Web applications and downloaded components that a user might want to run cautiously. Security policy rarely grants this kind of code permission to access the file system using standard I/O mechanisms, but, by default, code running from the local computer, a local network, or the Internet is granted the right to use isolated storage.