Easy, Reliable Distributed Storage and Backup?

RichiH writes "Most of you are the free IT staff of friends and family, just as I am. One of my largest headaches is backing up their data. What I am looking for allows for off-site storage on multiple server machines running Linux, has Linux & Windows clients that Just Work and require zero everyday effort (although a large-ish effort to set them up is just fine), allows for granular access control, is versioned and will, ideally, allow me to grab data automagically (think photo pool for your family where your mother, sister, etc., share each other's photos). This is something I've been trying to find for years, but I've never seen anything even closely resembling what I want. With the Wall Street Journal handing out its Technology Innovation Award to Cleversafe recently, I was once again reminded of this particular itch which needs scratching. Before I deploy it, I want to ask the Slashdot community for its opinion on that piece of software, and on potential alternatives. How do you solve this problem?"

Comments

AFS?

[TheRaven64]

AFS is only about 20 years old, and supported on Windows, Mac, and most flavours of *NIX, so it might not be sufficiently mature for your needs, however it does provide the following capabilities:

• Remote storage with local caching.
• Snapshots, allowing coarse-grained versioning.
• Replication on the server.

As well as all of the standard things you'd expect from a networked filesystem (ACLs, authentication, and so on).

If you set up an AFS cell with your volumes replicated across a few remote servers and get your clients to connect to this cell then it should be fine. Set a cron job to take regular snapshots, and dump them to some offline medium periodically.

Re:I can tell you how I solve it in a business

[PC_Freak]

Data protection legislation means that storing it with a hosted service is illegal unless I encrypt it myself before sending it offsite - I'm only aware of one tool which claims to be able to do this and still send data as a binary delta (it uses the rsync library) and that tool is still not particularly common in Linux distributions and not very widely used. Based on my limited understanding of crypto, when you encrypt data it should turn into pseudo-random noise, so if *any* bits change the whole thing changes (unless you're doing a block-cypher, but if it's chained-block then every portion *after* that will also change). So for large files, this seems like the delta would end up being practically the entire file, wouldn't it?