Cringely's P2P Backup Idea

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Posted by timothy on Sunday September 12, 2004 @05:57AM from the hey-baby-want-some-backup dept.

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."

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p2p backup by khrtt · 2004-09-12 06:03 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Freenet by John_Allen_Mohammed · 2004-09-12 06:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
Re:Queue Linus Quote in..... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-12 06:06 · Score: 5, Informative

In case they missed it.

"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
Interesting idea by scoser · 2004-09-12 06:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

Now the world's porn will be safe forever!
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.
Re:What an awesome idea by Mod+Me+God+Too · 2004-09-12 06:09 · Score: 5, Interesting

I once encoded some data in a few MP3s... this was back in 2000. The MP3s were long speech files... about 30mb/file @ 160kbps and were popular, but took so long to transfer, so to propegate the 'new' files as quickly as possible I reduced the bit rate from 160kbps to 32kbps and added in the 'extra' 'noise' as I did this - as it's speech it didn't really matter. If I do a search now they're easy to find, much easier than the original 160kbps were. This was just a test, no special data used - but an amazing way to archive and distribute data.

--
-- It is not the commies, the government, the nigger, nor the corporates. It is your paranoia.
Re:damn.. by dotwaffle · 2004-09-12 06:12 · Score: 5, Interesting

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!