Slashdot Mirror
A Different Idea For Distributed Storage
hojo writes: "A really cool idea for an anonymous, distributed storage system is actively being worked on. Talk about a way around censorship and control--check out this article at Forbes for more." The article talks about a system dubbed "OceanStore," a high-concept application of the same massively distributed and replicated data idea behind FreeNet and some other projects. The availability of massive storage cheaper and cheaper will start to change exactly what we think is worth saving and where it makes sense to store it. (Do we want a data cloud full of the digital pictures millions of people couldn't bring themselves to delete?)
in the example of the military having access to floorplans/etc, wouldn't this also bring about the possibility for the enemy to insert false floorplans and other things? (for example, a fake floorplan where the target "master bedroom" is actually a huge spike trap?) information warfare on a new level...
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
as far as I'm concerned, that's about all stuff like this is, glorified RAID
while the ideas behind it are great, prevent censorship and general control by authorities of free speach, it does beg the question, where does it end? and how many people are really going to be willing to dedicate equipment and bandwidth to this sort of thing?
personaly I don't know what people are thinking when they say that storage is so friggin cheap... it's certainly not for the average joe, I'm still stuck on a 20GB 5400RPM ATA/66 drive when I could make good use of a 60GB 7200RPM drive, I'm certainly not going to dedicate any significant portion of my precious drive space to store bits and peices of files belonging to other people, 90% of which probably don't need to be on a network of this sort anyway.
....I think you need to check your code, it seems your script is mistaking the 'f' in 'fp' for fourth, not first.
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
More information can be found here: http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu.
1. How do you get people/organisations to share their disk space, clock cycles, and bandwidth for other people's data? I'm not interested.
2. How do you index this thing? Centralised or distributed? Who controls it if central?
3. How do you clean up old stuff no one wants? Once your file(s) are copied numerous times, you are going to have extra overhead everywhere. Or can you send a command to all computers connected to delete said file?
There are so many questions that need to be addressed I don't know where to start.
> Do we want a data cloud full of the digital
> pictures millions of people couldn't bring
> themselves to delete?
O course we do !
Why ?
Because I prefer keeping trace of everything than just forbiding more and more things to people (e.g. hard disc encryption, CSS, etc.).
I like the idea of a central server to which are connected a bunch of network computers. The difference with the idea that was once made popular by Larry Ellison ?
It is that the central supercomputer dealt with will be distributed and thus virtual.
It will become something like a reticular subconscience in which people will have to dig very hard (because it'll have to be quite secured so that each user's privacy is respected).
And, as we are also dealing with A.I., it might become possible that some unknown problems appear that will require some e-psychanalysis.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
What about the privacy issues in distributed data storage? These always seem to be glossed over.
The usual argument is, "we got strong encryption, so everything's okay". However, this ignores, that when data is being stored in far flung places, the potential for interception by both domestic and international friendly and hostile entities is possible, some of which have the ability to break strong encryption. Think of the industrial espionage possibilities, or even just invasion of personal privacy.
"Let's face it; once quantum computing comes online, all cryptography is defunct."
Simply false. With what's currently known, public-key algorithms might be in trouble, but the secret-key stuff works just fine if we double the key lengths. 256-bit AES should be fine.
And even for public key stuff, "defunct" is massively overstating it.
--
Xenu loves you!
a storage site for every piece of ware ever released! if only we could be so blessed..
But I think Freenet can pretty easily be used as a basis for a system like OceanStore. A subnetwork of Freenet servers could agree to request your document for you periodically, ensuring that it stays available in their caches.
And, of course, this doesn't have the privacy and free speech elements that Freenet has. Unfortunately, I think those will make it hard for Freenet to truly prosper. ISP's will be afraid to run Freenet nodes.
For ages, I've wanted to be able to request data based on what it is, rather than where it is. For example, I wanted to write an installer that would ask for a dll by key, and the system would figure out where best to get it from. If the product CDROM is in the drive, get it from there. If you installed the product on another machine on the lan earlier, get it from a local cache. If another user of your ISP installed it recently, get it from the ISP's cache. Otherwise, find it on the Internet, either on my company's site or a closer mirror (maybe one that's been created automatically based on download patterns).
If Freenet doesn't grow to provide this, maybe OceanStore will. I'll be happy if either one does.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Well, don't use it then my friend. Know that you can always choose. Even not choosing is a choice.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
What I have yet to see (personally) is a good distributed way to share public encryption keys. Of all the uses of distributed/P2P file sharing I think key sharing would be one of the coolest uses. Increasing the availability of encryption keys would go along way towards getting people to use encryption and signing more often. Not only would this be a Good Thing for unrelated uses, you can also sign and encrypt your distributed files using the same network resources. Oh, there was a topic...shit.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Killing criminals does not bring their victims back nor does it give their relatives any relief or consolation. Taking human life is always wrong.
You say that you'd start with criminals, but who would be next? People with unpopular political opinions (like me), artists whose works you might find offensive (like me) or your personal enemies?
Where would it stop?
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
Notice in section 4.2 where they talk about data write policies. This resembles the IRC network quite a bit for writing. I envision a scenario in which ACLs and permissions can be hijacked, _especially_ if they used a distributed consensus algorithm (they mention these algorithms in several places).
.NET haters, this is exactly the sort of thing MS has in mind to store your data on. Notice in the conclusion section they compare their work most closely to the "Farsite" project, except theirs was designed with WANs in mind. Farsite is a MS Resaerch project :)
Making fully distributed untrusted systems is hard. Making hybrid distributed systems is harder.
Reading section 4.4.3 makes this apparent - they dont have a fully distributed system. If you want the most hardcore possible file-system semantics, a small number of servers with huge bandwidth vote on what to do. So its sort of centralized some of the time. later in 4.4.3 they say if you dont need such strong semantics you dont have to use these tier 1 machines to do the update ordering.
That said, We(tm) need a good anonymous ubiquotous data store. Incidentallly, for all you
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
...but it seems similar in conception to Usenet.
"You say that you'd start with criminals, but who would be next? "
Boy-girl bands.
Sure! That is why EMC and IBM are major players in the project.
Think about it.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
Maybe, but that's what makes us better people.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
Here's my idea for OceanStore:
Everyone who wants in chips in some money and gets a server with many terabytes of data...and puts it in the middle of the ocean
Why? Because you're in international waters, and pretty much can't be charged with shit. Do any illegal thing you want. Store MP3s, warez, MS Kerbos, whatever.
If you disagree with me, please do not resort to childish ad hominem attacks but post some rational arguments and we can discuss this. Maybe you can convince me that my arguments are not valid.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
As far as the guns go, they will not do much good to you when you're facing a trained army -- the killing machine that is the power behind the centralised government.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
An Anonymous Coward who likes to insult people. Grow up.
No-one knows but those who cannot tell us.
In order to further obscure the documents being stored, these different networks should cooperate with each idea, and occasionally swap files.
Not only would you not know what machine a file was on, but you also wouldn't even know what network it was on, or what protocol was managing it!
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Umm.. I'd be crying right now but there's not enough vapour here to make a tear drop. What the hell is the story here? "We're thinking of doing something with distributed data storage and we think there's gunna be a lot of it in the future because of mobile devices and that." sounds like a uncreative venture capital briefing. There's no technical details here. Even the web page posted above has an overview that is one sentence long (and contains very little content). Was there a page I missed? This is so non-existant they should make a new word for it.. I hereby coin the term "voidware" being vapourware that has not even formed yet. Sheesh, there's projects on sourceforge that have been abondoned for months that more in the planning stags than this!
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is a newbie question since I don't really understand the workings of distributed networks but it would help me if you give me some much needed details.
So that'll mean that our handheld device will have to synchronise with a server that will distribute it to many other servers. What if one of those servers was unavailable at the moment of the synchronisation? Also wouldn't it take time to send data back and forth between all those servers and how can we be sure that no one will be able to crack this encryption method?
Instead of just encrypting data, how about having software that splits files into many pieces and then stores them elsewhere. None of the files know of the existence of the other ones. Only the original author has the right key to put the files together again. The files would have randomly generated names and random date time stamps to further obscure their origin and make it harder for others to possibly re-assemble the pieces
So isn't this just the digital equivialant of having a box with all of your old negatives in it? :) You have so many pictures you don't know what to do with them and no really good way of organizing them.
Speaking of which, my wife is a Librarian and she was amazed at how few of digital photograps are really kept. Things like your state's (if you're in the US anyway) historical society have tons and tons of negatives that if the person who took them had the ability to instantly delete them, they probably would have. You never know how important something would be 10, 20 or even 100 years down the road. So perhaps having limitless storage isn't a bad thing from this perspective.
Good Fast Cheap. Pick any two.
Hopefully it has a versionining notion. The long term goal IMHO is to keep every version of every document ever made, forever.
The problem with a system like this is that it is designed for adults with adults (and the self-restraint that maturity brings) in mind. I'd reckon its going to be next to impossible to regulate when the kids find out they have almost unlimited storage capacity, for a week or so until the system collapses under the weight of the kids' vast warez collections. If you think they are going to assemble their collections efficiently, then you need treatment. How likely is it that the kids will:
Search the public areas archive extensively to determine which parts of their collection are already stored
Identify the set of files in the current collection of thousands that are not already in the store
Segregate their collection and upload all these missing files
Create an index of their archive for distribution?
Unlikely. They are all just going to upload their entire collections en masse. Cognitive simplicity is a powerful decision maker.
Everybody is coming up with neat solutions for this and that, and saying how great it would be if we all had cryptography and online secure storage and stuff. How come no one ever thinks: what are the bastards likely to get up to with this neat new stuff, and how can I prevent them from doing this in the first place.
The world (and the net particularly) is not full of decent, unselfish, philanthropic people. It is full of slash-and-burn arseholes who will happily spoil everything for everybody (themselves included) as long as their short-term desires are met.
As I see it the difference between me and some ivory-tower do-gooder is that they have faith in humanity: they'll be diligent, noble, unselfish and charitable. I have faith in people: faith that they'll be lazy, screw up, not give a shit about the next guy, and doing this while complaining about how they are being shafted and that they are the victim in all this really.
You know I'm right...
Gary
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
I don't normally try to emulate Bob Silverman (factorisation expert and great sci.crypt flamer) but, uh, where does that opinion come from, and does the sun shine there?
If you've any basis for that belief at all, I'd love to hear it...
--
Xenu loves you!
Just because the content that ABC Corporation has on their "presence" in the OceanStore is replicated all over the internet-sub-3, doesn't mean that its less succeptable to "hacker" attacks. From what I gleam from that article, the information that you publish still has to have an entry point onto the net in the form of an ISP. So, what is to stop "Cracker Joe" from cracking into ABC Corp's ISP and cracking the original page, then allowing it to be replicated all over the net? Since bandwith and storage is going to be so cheap, I'm guessing that this will be nothing more than high level proxying with encryption.
My second point is that this is supposed to be available in 10 years. According to Moore's Law (which we all know and love) the computing power (presumably meaning what any consumer has access to) doubles every 18 months. Well 10 * 12 = 120 / 18 = 6.67. Todays technology allows 1.2 Ghz computers for the masses. Multiply 1.2 Ghz * 2^6.67 ~= 122 Ghz computers. Lets be conservative and say that the 1 Mb Ram available on Intel processors is equally as ambitious; meaning we have 104 MB L2 Cache on board. What levels of encryption are we talking about here. Given the distributed.net statistics, less people are cracking rc5 / des / csc / ogr blocks daily, but the keyrate keeps going up. Why is this? Because the microcode in the newer processors enables the small bitwise rotations and xor's and other little commands that are quite confusing to non-geeks enable the basic functions that crack encryption to be greatly accellerated through caching of code in L2 Cache and processor speed. Now I'm not saying that we'll still be using this technology as its cludgy at higher speeds, but we'll have something roughly equivalent. (As an aside - I just thought of the possibility of playing Quake XII or whatever! Imagine the frags at that speed!!!) The point is the average user will have access to the power of todays supercomputers. For the encryption to be strong, even with something like PGP keys, a brute force attack isn't entirely out of the question. Granted that encryption will most likely increase to some insane level like 2^16304 or whatever, but still given enough time, eventually it will fall.
Just my buck-o-five.
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Correct. I can't remember the name of the algorithm now - Grove's algorithm? Anyway, yes, for arbitrary such problems the search time is on the square root of the search space for a quantum computer, so it only takes 2^64 steps to test all 128-bit keys. Which is why 256-bit AES will be strong for a while...
--
Xenu loves you!
I'm sure the Russian people are very grateful to Putin for looking after their safety in such a responsible intelligent manner. This decision was clearly well thought out. I can not imagine the brain power it must have required to decide that the answer to prison overcrowding is to just release convicted criminals. I am truly in awe, as I imagine the good law abiding citizens of Russia are.
--
Daniel J. Kelly
"(Do we want a data cloud full of the digital pictures millions of people couldn't bring themselves to delete?)"
It's a quaint thought, but the answer to this cynical question is YES, people do want that. Mass storage such as the type described in the article will provide one more avenue for Net Clogging. SPAM, virus alerts, tag-you're-it, love emails, Microsoft Outlook viruses, sob stories.... they may all be email, but when people can anonymously store large files such as graphics and audio/video, the people in the world that want to clog up the Internet and make it unusable will have one more avenue through which to do so - distributed, secure storage.
These people will upload tons of files that are junk to a lot of people - that is, many people will upload tons of junk; some people will have good intentions and others will have malicious intentions.
Freedom has a price - on the Internet that price is giving equal treatment to all data transmissions, whether they be from people with good intentions, or people who just want to disrupt the Internet as much as possible.
He's talking about bringing on the very scenario that led to the premise behind the game Deus Ex: distributed monitoring.
"A blip [of Echelon III] runs on every electronic device on earth" - Morgan Everett, Illuminati leader, an approximate quote from Deus Ex
Also note that in the game, the ousted LEADER of the Illuminati was Lucius Debeers.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The first is probably no longer the best place to start from for crypto info, but the other two are pretty interesting and I hadn't seen them before. I don't see anything there about a further root two improvement on Grover's algorithm though.
I apologise for being ruder than I should have been - it was meant to be funnier and less harsh, too much caffeine. But I *do* wish people wouldn't post opinions on the difficulty of cryptanalytic problems that are based on no good evidence.
--
Xenu loves you!
The most intriguing aspect of distributed mass storage is the potential to actually *reduce* the total amount of storage needed to store information on the internet.
Fundamentally, most of the contents of my hard drive already come from somewhere else---programs, data files, cached web pages, etc. Much of that information is pretty rarely used, and ends up being discarded (the web cache is really useful for a few pages, and a waste of space for the rest) or languishing (little-used but still essential software).
A "good enough" distributed store, possibly combined with good versioning and clever uses of caching/disconnection would make it practical for me to offload most of this useless garbage. Yes, I am instead accepting encrypted chunks of data from all over. But I bet this data is comparable in size to the savings realized by commoning up all the crud that is found on most hard drives.
it is interesting to see that ibm is embracing this project, given that they like to amass server and storage power on large mainframes, single points of failure.
the whole concept of distributed storage, i find, is a more "enlightened" one but it is also one that is harder to implement. i believe that it is theoretically impossible to ensure consistency of data in a distributed storage system.
in such a system, the following criteria have to be satisfied for successful operation:
these conditions are difficult to satisfy, to say the least. also as the system grows in size, these conditions become more difficult to satisfy. so i am interested to see how these problems are addressed in this project..
--
mike's code
The ultimate distributed storage device... 1) Secure 2) Uploads to it are incredibly fast 3) Comes with every *NIX OS, gratis. 4) Limitless capacity. 5) Easy to use. 6) Incredibly reliable. The only downside: retrieval times are somewhat slow. /dev/null is the distributed storage solution for the masses!
This is interesting. The lessons from Napster, general network / lan files sharing, as well as dozens of other files sharing technologies, even ftp mirrors show us that this is a powerful and useful sharing proposal.
However, it isn't the only thing. There is still a place for data that is not shared that has higher fences or protection and authentication gaurding it.
I think about my data as being more like my money. I want to be able to retain full control of who gets it and when.
For instance, I want everyone to be able to access my boring personal web site all the time for free. I want only my wife and myself to be able to access my tax returns for the last five years. I want my child to be able to access the family photo gallery, but I don't want him to be able to delete it. I want to be able to transfer all my personal data from one data warehouse to another as easy as it is to transfer banks.
When people start talking about these file sharing technologies they forget that the data we have fits into many different profiles. Each of them needs a different level of protection.
Now one person I know suggested that people will always want their personal data on their own hard drive. Sounds like a good idea in theory, but here are the facts as I see them.
Now, as recently as one year ago, I would have said that most people had less then one meg of important digital content, that was unique. Now it's a different story with digital photos (good or bad, it doesn't matter) digital movies, banking and tax information, etc..
My two cents.
timbu
Mojo Nation is a working implementation of almost all of the concepts described in the OceanStore paper. Mojo Nation breaks up data into pieces and then uses Rabin's Information Dispersal Algorithm to create eight redundant shares of those pieces, only half of the eight shares being necessary to recreate the original piece. Blocks are identified by their SHA1 hashes and documents are identified by the eight hashes of the pieces that make up the "hash tree." (a.k.a. the Dinode). Without the Dinode you cannot put the file back together since each piece is also encrypted. Even if your block server holds every single block in the file you still can't tell what it is.
Block servers only handle a small portion of the hash space and your broker keeps extensive local performance statistics on each other broker in order to make intelligent decisions on whom to ask first for a block (like keeping a map of who is logically closest in the network). There is much, much more.
Mojo Nation works today. While it doesn't have a large enough population of block servers to handle truly massive files yet, it handles a CD's worth of MP3's for instance. Here's a Mojo URL for an hour long set of really great freely distributable music by Medeski, Martin, and Wood. (it's Jazz). It's about 80 megs total but when you ask your broker to fetch the link you'll get an HTML page describing the performance with individual links to each song (i.e. clicking the link won't download 80 megs of data unless you fetch it recursively).
If OceanStore sounds interesting, you should check out Mojo Nation It actually works. The interface is rough but that's because it's a simple web interface (easy and works on every platform). The core stuff is what the developers have been working on.
Burris
Burris
Burris
Darpa, fittingly, contributed to the $500,000 in seed funding for the OceanStore project, which now amounts to just a few computers, a few grad students and a couple of published academic papers.
Three VA Linux 1220 ($8,000 each)
Grad students ($50,000/year each - probably less)
Research papers (hire Jon Katz to write 'em $5,000) Grand total: ~ $174,000 leaving $326,000 for my Swiss account. Sweet
1. Create large file of random numbers.
2. Create random file name.
3. Upload into distributed storage space.
4. Repeat from number one.
Why? First, simply to see what the system will do, and how long it will go. Second, they think it gives them reason to call themselves "31337".
If they don't have enough net bandwidth to do this, then they will wrapper it in virus code and drop it out as a bunch of emails. Letting other folks do this will leave their connection fast enough for T4C.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
As one of the graduate students working on OceanStore, I should add a little to this discussion.
Your point about data management being more expensive than the storage itself is absolutely correct. OceanStore addresses this issue in several ways:
First, we use replication and coding algorithms to ensure the integrity and durability of data. Documents that are actively being written to are managed by a group of servers participating in a Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm. This ensures that despite machine failure or compromise (of up to approximately a third of the machines), your data is safe from loss and corruption. It also provides availability, since from the algorithm's point of view a failing server and an unavailable server are the same.
Data that is not actively being written is stored in Erasure-coded form and spread across the system. A rate N Erasure code breaks an object into Nb pieces, where b is the number of blocks in the object. If any arbitrary b of these pieces can later be recovered, the entire document can be reproduced. For example, with a rate 2 Erasure code, a 1 MB document will be broken into a number of blocks totaling 2 MB in size, such that if any 1 MB of them can be recovered, the whole document can be reproduced. Since each block can be stored on a different server, this gives tremendous durability to data. It also takes nice advantage of the fact that storage is cheaper than the management of storage. I should also mention that we include algorithms which verify the integrity of the reconstructed data.
Second, OceanStore has an introspection system which manages the placement of data throughout the system. While replication and coding keep data safe, introspection moves data around for optimal locality. If your data is across the world from you, you may not care that it is correct or durable, since it takes so long to get at it. Introspection uses pattern recognition techniques to discover what data is important to you and move it or cache it near your current location. This removes the necessity of paying administrators to discover this information and move the data manually in order to improve the performance of the system.
Finally, in order to locate all of this constantly moving information, OceanStore employs a two-tier location system which provides fast access to nearby data and availability to far-away data.
Our recently published paper, OceanStore: An Architecture for Global-Scale Persistent Storage describes these issues in more detail and can be found on our publications page.
Sean
On further examination - this basically looks like the product of someone who looked at the Freenet design, didn't understand it, and tried to reimplement it.
--
From the time I got my first computer when I was 11 years old (MANY moons ago - it was a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K), I was told the importance of having a backup. If that meant an extra cassette, or some handwritten code on a piece of paper, so be it.
Backing up your data should be common sense - unfortunately it isn't, but it isn't that hard to find information on what a backup is, or what it is for. I cannot understand why people simply think that when data is put into a computer, it will always be there (I guess they think that high-tolerance mechanical devices never wear out)? The majority of people clearly do not understand the power and nature of the tool they are using. It is almost like they expect their car to run forever without an oil change...
Oops - I forgot - some cars can now go for a damn long time without an oil change, while the emmisions/engine control computer reconfigures everything, while the engine wears down - until one day it does break. Manufacturers started making these 100,000 mile cars because people are either too stupid or lazy to have periodic maintenance done, instead opting to "buy" a new car every 3-5 years (and perpetually paying for the vehicle, or worse, LEASING it). Is it that hard to take a car in to have the oil changed, or to do it yourself? Brakes, same thing (the number of times I have heard metal-to-metal brake wear is appalling - how those people stop at all is a wonder) - it really isn't that difficult to replace one's own brakes on a car (though drum brakes do tend to be a bitch).
I don't think everyone needs to know everything about their computer - but they should have common sense about it, simple maintenance, care, and troubleshooting at minimum. Backups are a part of this.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you don't have data that could result in loss of life for others, then not using a deniable system means you can prove that you don't have it to someone who might otherwise kill you for it.
Deniability is pretty tricky stuff. Of course deniable crypto systems should work against a judge, who can't punish you just because they suspect you're holding back but can't prive it. In theory anyway.
--
Xenu loves you!
I am still rather surprised that they don't mention Freenet anywhere in their Related Work section.
--
Having been involved in user billings from a variety of angles, I can tell you that sending a bill has little effect in such cases. Collecting money in advance, decrementing the account, and chopping the service off when it reaches zero does work, provided you can adequately tie the user of the service to the account being billed. Otherwise owner of said account calls up about the bill and gets a credit if you can't really nail this down.
Arbitrary currencies are an idea that I like, Especially if the currency is tied to a hardware artifact that can be tested for presence, say, you add another eighty gig of storage to the public pool, you get another x storage credits per month.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I am not advocating backing up everything - in fact, unless it is a server, only back up the important data. When a crash occurs, re-install the software, then restore the data (like I said, unless it is a server, or some other form of work environment where the downtime is gonna cost money).
Of the data backed up, it should be reviewed, organised, and prioritized to get rid of the least important stuff, keep the important stuff - then put it where it would be best served. Most of my data goes onto ZIP disks, as those fill I go into an organization mode, build an image, and move it to a CDR, then wipe the ZIP disks for more. The ZIP disks are mainly there for convenience, not permanence (not that I expect CDRs to be permanent or anything). Some stuff I resign to the "a copy can be found on the net" bin - and get rid of. Other things I hold a backup only on the hard drive and a ZIP disk (like my web sites), because they change (ir)regularly, and there will always be a copy somewhere. I don't consign these to a CDR, unless they are dead sites that I have moved off to an archive.
I guess one of the good skills in backup is to be organized...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have 27,000+ pictures that I have taken in the past 3 years, all backed up on CD. Everything adds up to about 11 Gigabytes, which is only 1/4 of my new $200 45Gb Maxtor ATA100 drive. I use ThumbsPlus to organize things, and it does a great job, doing the thumbnails, tracking keywords, all in an Access97 compatible format.
Ok.. here's the math.... Storage for 27,000 photos... $50. The backup on 24 CDs is about $12 of media.
--Mike--
PS: Yes, I still have ALL of my old floppies, and a 5 1/4" drive that can read them. Soon I'll put all that on my HDD, and back it up to a CD or two.
Unlike sourceforgeware, however, once you talk people into giving you the cash, then you *do* have to work on the project. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed at its original goals - if you knew what the results were going to be, it wouldn't be *research*.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Those "small number of servers with huge bandwidth" are owned by some company with which you would have a contract requiring them to do The Right Thing. So if they screw it up, just sue.
You are right that OceanStore is not fully distributed, but so what? It seems like it can actually provide stonger guarantees than e.g. Freenet.
...but it's that last 10% that gets tricky. In particular, I could (theoretically, since OceanStore doesn't exist yet) upload some data into the OceanStore and as long as I keep paying my bill, that data will be available forever. If I upload some data into Mojo Nation, it might be gone tomorrow. One reason why OceanStore is taking longer to develop is because it attempts to provide stronger assurances.