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Distributed Internet Backup System
deadfx writes "Since disk drives are cheap, backup should be cheap too. Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a fire, flood, power surge, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers. The Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) is designed to implement this vision."
This is just the next evolutionary change in P2P. Encrypting data and exchanging the encryption key so that only those "in the know" can exchange files and the *AA groups don't know what you are trading.
In the "Pefect Example of Talking Out of Both Sides Of Your Mouth" Department:
This is posted on the home page:
Note that DIBS is a backup system not a file sharing system like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, etc. In fact, DIBS encrypts all data transmissions so that the peers you trade files with can not access your data.[emphasis mine]
This is posted on the documentation page:
Make sure you give your gpg public key to any peers you want to trade files with.[emphasis mine]
Some nice folks at Stanford are also creating a different flavor of network backup called rdiff-backup. I'll just plagiarize the description from the homepage:
rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership (if it is running as root), and modification times. Finally, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted.
The homepage also links to a project called duplicity, which operates on a similar principle, but uses GnuPG to encrypt data to prevent spying/modification.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
It was designed for use in low-bandwidth envrionments. Not only do you get the benefit of a distributed backup system, but you get inherant (sp?) fault-tolerance, load-balancing, etc. Yes, over a low-bandwidth connection a file still takes a long time to copy, but OpenAFS is designed to accomodate this (not going into detail here, go to the OpenAFS site if you're curious). I am a fanatic OpenAFS user so I am somewhat biased. We have however implemented OpenAFS on a 1.4TB datastore at one of our customer sites (medical market) that has key data (a couple hundred Gig) distribted to 3 slave RO cells (again, read up on OpenAFS for answers). Rock solid reliability is an understatement.