Slashdot Mirror
Cringely's P2P Backup Idea
gewg_ writes "If Napster and Bit Torrent had a baby, would it Baxter?
As a follow-on to Cringely's
last column where he talked about having a backup strategy in the
wake of Hurricane Frances, this week he proposes a distributed RAID notion as a solution."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
But on the serious side, the claim of using encryption to store data on someone's hard drive worries me. Let's say the encryption gets broken. Now you might get Aunt Nedda's cookie recipes, but then again, you might get BobCo's strategic investment plan for the next 6 months as well. I can see people signing up just for the chance to hunt through people's data.
How many times would you have to duplicate the data to ensure that no corruption (both intentional and unintentional) occurred? You would have to compare copies of the data to each other to make sure it matched. I wouldn't want my backup corrupt because some joker wrote Goatse.cx pictures to it a few thousand times. You would also have to store additional data in the event that people ran the program and then quit, taking your backup along with them. So maybe you would have 1gb backed up over the network, and 10gb of other people's crap on your computer. And thats assuming it ran on some sort of credit system where you only got to backup a percentage of what you allowed people to store. Otherwise hoarders would run rampant and take over the system.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
And compared to a mini-iPod, you get something that 1) you don't have to worry about power since it has no batteries and doesn't require external power, 2) you get the same amount of disk capacity for something like 1/3rd the cost, 3) THEY SUPPORT USB MASS-STORAGE drivers so any modern OS can talk to it without extra drivers or funky software. Yes, it's not a portable music player, but this solution may be more appropriate for geeks who spend all their time next to a computer in one form or another, or are a little more interested in the data-transport capabilities than the convenient music playing.
I lost interest in what this guy has to say when I read this:
"But while it might be easy to use Gmail for offsite backup, I couldn't bring myself to do that just because of the intrusive nature of Gmail. Remember this is a system that is by invitation only, which means that Google can quickly map a social network establishing who knows who. And since Gmail actually analyzes the content of your e-mail and can automatically group it by subject (how creepy is that?), Google not only knows who your friends are, but what do you talk about with those friends."
I nominate this to the prestigious "Fud of the week" award.
For larger, business-driven uses, you probably want something like DataSafe. They will keep media for you in a very safe place. Or better yet, keep your whole business disaster protected -have more than one live site for IT operations.
Maybe you don't care about that data today, since the terror experience is still fresh, but you might care about it later. For example, assume that data was full of photographs of friends, deceased relatives, and other impossible to replace stuff. This backup scheme would've suited you even better than grabbing the hard drive, because you wouldn't even have had to do that.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I am not trying to minimize your experience with Ivan, so please don't take this comment as such. The story you posted sounds crazy as hell and I wouldn't wish such an episode on anyone except my worst enemies.
I do believe you reacted a little emotionally, which is understandable given your current situation. I think that if you look at the article again, you will find the only reason he mentions hurricanes is because Frances news reports before the fact got him thinking about it.
That being said, I don't think Crigley was trying to insinuate that someone in a situation such as yours should or could worry about data. The point I took away from the article is that a person wouldn't need to worry about data at all under any disaster circumstance if you implement a system such as the one he proposes.
I think that if you look at it like that, you will agree that he is not trying to discount the gravity of your experience.
-ft
Is it just me, or did this poster sound like some 1930's colonialist complaining about how 'the natives' got out of control?
You want to go to play-school and take advantage of incredibly low living costs due to enormous depravity between what you hold in your wallet and what the average local makes- you'd better not complain when law breaks down and you suddenly find yourself more wanted than a sugar cookie next to an ant mount.
Funny thing- when one of your two laptops is worth several times more than what the average Grenadan makes in a year, and law breaks down- all those people who smiled at you every day suddenly want to beat you for your money and any food you might have. Huh. Interesting.
We chartered our own jet out of Grenada yesterday to Barbados
Wow. Too bad you took all that medical knowledge that could have been used to help people, and skipped the fuck outta town. So you can afford to charter your own jet- and you want sympathy from people? Did you happen to notice the thousands of tin huts smashed flat (or missing entirely) through your plane window? They're going to have massive problems with disease and famine- and you all just left, despite having medical training that could have saved lives.
Please help metamoderate.
OK, your life sucks right now, and I'm sorry.
You're a student. You've accumulated less than a decade? worth of useful data. Depending on what that data is (scientific data hard to reproduce, personal writing (books/plays), scientific data easy to reproduce, or highscores on minesweeper), that data may have a $ value from 0 to maybe 10s of thousands of dollars (which means time). Small companies that have been in business for just a few years can have data that is worth millions of dollars. Ask your nearest bio prof. how much their personal genetic testing database is worth in time, effort, and money.
Second,
I quickly took the hard drives out of my two laptops (and the external drive I have), picked up a GSM roaming phone, any cash I had, a passport and two pairs of clothes... We were worried for our lives and whether we had water or not, data was not our concern.
It seems that data was your concern.
The P2P solution either requires users to have their cable modem pegged and nearly unusable for 60 days (80gb is the current best laptop drive size, most cable modems max out at 128kbps up), or that they backup only a fraction of their hard drive. I can't quite figure out how carrying a laptop drive around, full of your MP3's, which you can play on any computer you sit at, is any less convenient than either of those options.
Good thinking, giving it a name that people will ignore. "What do I care about betamax? I never even see one anymore."
There are several research groups doing work on distributed P2P backup systems. I know there's a group at MS doing this, as well as a group at MIT (http://catfish.csail.mit.edu/~kbarr/pstore/), and several others that don't come to mind offhand. I did a project on this in grad school, so I'm familiar with the research.
:)
There are a lot of issues here, mostly centering around the fact that you can't trust people in an open P2P network.
1) They might look at your data.
2) They might not be online when you want your data.
3) They might delete your data, or do other malicious things to it (insert viruses, etc.).
4) They might freeload by using space on other hosts and then deleting all the data they receive.
5) If a host leaves the system permanently, you need to detect that and replicate its data somewhere else. Also, how do you know whether it's leaving permanently or just logging off for a while?
#1 is easy, just encrypt the data. #2, #3, #4, and #5 are hard because data integrity is really important in a backup solution. You end up having to replicate the data all over the place to "ensure" that it'll be available when you need it, but then you've got the problem of having to donate more space than you receive to use the system. Plus, it's still not certain that your data will be available when you need it.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's a hard problem.
"Cringely writes: Apple, for example, will let you mount up to a 100 megabyte iDrive as part of its .mac Internet service, but that costs $99 per year. Eight dollars per month for 100 megabytes of storage is too darned much."
For that $100 per year, you could buy 3 128"MB" USB-keys that give you more storage space, have faster copy-times from your computer, and have 3 times the redundancy as the network-storage option. They're small enough to post to a friend in a different location if you want (cheap, and all backups are encrypted?) or even to hide them around your city if you need security against raids (no pun intended).
But remember, you can't swallow them if you get caught...