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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."
Baxter is, of course, the famous IRC client for BeOS. (Hi, Seth!)
Get off my launchpad!
Depending on exactly what you have stored, millions of people may want to help you backup as soon as possible.
The coolest voice ever.
I think this is old news. Some people have been backing up the source code for viruses that they wrote on Kazaa for months now.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Just insert a bunch of data into the network.. record the keys and retrieve once a week then delete. That should keep the data retrievable from the network for a good while. Using two nodes would help. Plus everything is encrypted with some heavy shit.
:(
Or, just make a local-freenet on the company lan.. everything is encrypted and unretrievable without the proper keys, so it's very secure and it's distributed.. + FEC encoding.
That assumes freenet works, AFAIK it's still fucking broken. Ian Clarke is playing too much politics with the project and the only coder that really understands freenet (Mathew Toseland) is swamped with ideas, day after day.. it just gets worse and worse... The donations seemed like a good idea, but after watching the DEV list for the last 18 months, I realize it's a failed project
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
In case they missed it.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
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.
Cringley's not the first with this kind of idea. In fact, the Freenet Project already implements something to this effect. Although not specifically designed for reliable backups, the distributed caching algorithms essentially replicate data towards where it's most often needed, helping to improve network performance and creating copies of important data along the way so that it won't be destroyed if a central server fails. Obviously not a commercial solution, but very interesting.
Ideas like Cringely's will be impossible if the INDUCE Act passes.
Save Betamax is a national Congress call-in day this tuesday to oppose the INDUCE Act. It might be our last chance to stop this bill.
I had this idea in about '97 or '98. I looked around to see if anyone else had done anything like this (remember, this is kinda pre-mass-P2P) and found that someone had done so, but on a business scale solution. I think it was called Mango, and is still in production today. It essentially made a portion of your drive available for a drive letter, then whetever was copied onto it could be seen by all. The data was stored in at least 2 places, so if one went down, there was still one copy, and the remaining copy would duplicate, so that there was always at least 2 copies. In the end, I think nobody went for it because it was too expensive... But this is EXACTLY what a lot of Small-Medium businesses need atm. Bring on the Mango's!
It's a neat idea. In a nutshell, he suggests a Peer to Peer encrypted storage network. You get exactly as much storage room as you are willing to offer yourself for others to use. When you store anything, it's encrypted and automatically spread to other systems.
It doesn't make for a very safe backup, though: What happens if somebody decides to stop the service and just deletes his local storage? You've got no more backup at least for a while, and you might not even know it. And of course, other people have head crashes, too, which would also obliberate your backup at least for the time it takes to recreate it from your own data. Of course, by that time, you might have deleted it yourself, either by accident or knowingly, since you have a backup after all. A viable solution would be to store every file multiple times on different remote servers, although that'd lower the storage capacity you get. It's still the right step, though.
The crucial problem is that the service provider can't really give any guarantees that you will be able to regain your lost data. With three or more independent copies in different locations, it's very unlikely that the backup won't work for some reason, but a backup that's not 100% is not a very useful one, especially in those situations where backups are really crucial.
It's still a neat idea, and to my knowledge has not been done to that degree of sophistication. Of course, as others suggest, nobody is stopping you from inserting encrypted data into Freenet, but that's nowhere near as fast and secure as this could be. And while it's not a true backup, it's better than no backup at all, and most likely enough security for many persons.
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Peer Pressure
If your character data was stored on everyone else's computer, it would act like a virtual server, where if a few data sets get hacked, they'd be corrected by the whole.
P2P can work in wild ways we haven't even tapped.
too bad orrin hatch is trying to outlaw p2p:
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
I just went through Hurricane Ivan in Grenada. If you have been watching the coverage you should know that our island was completely destroyed. There is no water, no electricity, and no security. The university I attend (St. George's) lied to the students' parents about our situation. There were looters with guns and machetes threatening students. The first two nights we fended for ourselves with a large bonfire and homemade weapons, knives, pipes, etc. The third night we had 10 minutes to pack up and leave since we could see the looters lighting fires to apartment buildings on the road we were on. 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 ran to campus. Campus had about 200 male students lighting bonfires and running security teams to monitor the area. We chartered our own jet out of Grenada yesterday to Barbados which is where I am writing this from. My point is this: no one cares about data in this situation. No one wants to know about RAID or tape backups. If it came down to it, I would have ran with only a passport, a phone, and cash. We were worried for our lives and whether we had water or not, data was not our concern. People need a reality check. How many of you can claim that you went through a Category III or IV hurricane on an isolated island fending for their lives? Not many, so quite franly Cringely can go to hell.
This idea is poorly thought out. It has a couple of *major* flaws, imo.
#1) It doesn't recognize the reality of the complexity of backup software. Kinda easy to gloss over 'automated' backups without ever describing it. Pretty hard to imagine some piece of software that can universally back stuff up on everyone's hard drive and at the same time be very easy to use. Imagine mom/dad trying to use software with similar capabilities to Veritas BackupExec isn't easy. And.. imagine the wide variety of live files and databases that it wouid have to handle.
#2) Data integrity. He suggests a 1:1 ratio for backup space. Not hardly. How is he going to have any kind of redundancy with that? Crashes and people unsubscribing will happen all the time. The data would have to have a *lot* of tolerance to that.
A parity solution wouldn't be nearly enough. That assumes that only 1 failure at a time happens (using RAID 5 as my basis here). It would be easy to imagine that one person unsubscribed with part of your data and another had a crash or corruption problem.
So.. complete mirroring would be necessary. Again, its easy to imagine 2 people's system going offline at the same time.. so, you'd probably need more than 2x Mirror. At this point... how much is enough to ensure reliability? 3x 4x 5x ? ? ? How much do you trust your average netizen?
So.. pick your number and then divide your backup space by it. Like 5x? Add 10GB and you have 2GB usable storage. Not very good.
I'll just skip over the 'auto backup' of people's 40GB storage over a 128K up line for now.. already typed too much...