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Online Storage With a Twist

Posted by timothy on from the wiseacres-will-volunteer-to-store-porn dept.

mssmss writes "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor — whose survival my storage depends on. It looks like Wuala has a way to do this, according to this story in the Economist. They use donated disk space of users to scatter your encrypted files over multiple computers."

6 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Nice idea by Hyppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's like RAID for online storage.

    Sounds great, but what happens when a massive worm outbreak occurs?

  2. Single point of failure by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor â" whose survival my storage depends on."

    And when the master server that knows where all those little pieces are goes down, you are still without your data.

  3. Hmmm.... by Facegarden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hmm... sounds good. I'll donate 2TB of space each from multiple computers at different locations and between all of them i'm bound to have two critical pieces of your files, then all i have to do is shut them all down! Muah haha haaaa!

    And actually, what would happen if a major disaster shut down all the PC's in a major metropolitan area? Does the service provide enough redundancy that even if everyone in silicon valley went offline, my files would still be safe? I'd rather know where my data is.

    Also, slashverteisment? The concept is interesting but the story doesn't bring up the more interesting issue of privacy, it seems like just an ad.
    -Taylor

    --
    Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
  4. The lack of access control by apankrat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > I don't think I want to be liable for the data that someone puts on my PC

    I don't want random people's data on my disk. Period.

    I was a beta tester for Wuala and the lack of access control to my donated disk space was the biggest issue. I talked to their CTO and suggested to have an option of donating the space to specific peers only, which should've not been hard to do given they have the social grouping support in place already. He didn't see an issue with wildcarded access though, so they were not planning (nor in fact did) anything about it.

    --
    3.243F6A8885A308D313
  5. Oh joy. by R2.0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Step 1: Joe pervert is busted (legitimately) for kiddie porn. It is determined he stored some of it with this service.
    Step 2: Service is subpoenaed, and they give out all the user info for all the places where the bits of the files are stored.
    Step 3: Arrest hundreds of people, declare a major kiddie porn ring busted, receive promotion.
    Step 4: GOTO Step 1

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  6. Churn is your enemy by mcorner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On paper it is mostly a great idea.

    We had a paper on some tricks to play in file systems to make it perform better:

    http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/mcorner/papers/fast_2007_tfs.pdf

    But when you get down to it, churn is your biggest enemy. If you look at the rate at which people join and leave p2p networks, the amount of replication you need to do can use a lot of bandwidth. Every time a user quits (or drive crashes etc.) all of the data they were storing for others must be replicated again. If they aren't available online for a while you have to assume they have left the network and replicate proactively. See the paper for a few sample calculations based on the churn found in systems like kazaa and skype.

    -M