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Distributed Internet Backup System

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the here-have-my-drive dept.

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."

7 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Problem = bandwidth. by caluml · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The main problem with this approach (and for that matter Freenet) is that it is slow for all but the smallest files.

    Bandwidth is still the most precious commodity in computing. Once we get fibre to every house, then distributed storage will make sense.

    --
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    1. Re:Problem = bandwidth. by nano2nd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're right in that today's infrastructure isn't made for chuffing massive, hard-drive-sized hunks of data back and forth.

      But what about incremental backups?

      OK so you've got to get your base image uploaded -somehow- but after that, data changes very little on a daily basis and this level of data transfer to some secure backup repository won't be a problem at all with current bandwidth.

      --
      G4 Hackintosh
  2. All my data and software... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny
    All my data and software are backed up on crackers computers.

    I'm not worried. %-)

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:All my data and software... by BillFarber · · Score: 5, Funny

      Are you saying you only use white-peoples' computers for backup?

  3. do this with schools by octalgirl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We do this with neighbor school districts. We also backup all buildings, over the WAN and at night, to a file on the hard drive of another building. We do this in two places, so backups criss-cross. Because of the size and time it takes, this can only happen at night and only one building per night, so there is a downside. But if a building goes down, I know I have a secondary (besides the tape in that building) to fall back on.

  4. Security? by vano2001 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What if it is sensitive data? Do you think even with all that cryptography and secure computing blabla people will trust storing their important files on other people's computers? think not. There are companies who put their backups into safes ... ask *them* to put it online on a slashdot reader's PC. See what they answer. Freenet and similar networks are only good for general [public] domain data

  5. Distributed RAID Like Backups by angry_beaver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This should work a little differently.
    Why not stripe your data accross many hosts with parity data being stored on serveral. A central server would maintain a list of servers containing your data. In the event of a failure, you would simply fireup the client, that would contact this server for a list of your backup "devices" and it would start pulling in, reconstructing and decrypting the data.
    This would have a couple bonuses...

    1) You could stripe it accross 100 machines, and have another 100 with parity data so that any 50% of the machines can be unavaliable and you can still get your data back.

    2) Security - Rather than having a full copy of your data on their machine, each node only has a small subset of your data, and does not know where to find the rest of the data making reconstruction nearly impossible for the storage node. GPG would be used on top of this.