4 ms·

Shouldn't there already be a lot of existing tech for doing crowd backup/sync? Quick googling yields at least a few companies which allow you to donate unused h

by rawnlq 12y ago

Shouldn't there already be a lot of existing tech for doing crowd backup/sync? Quick googling yields at least a few companies which allow you to donate unused hard drive space in exchange for benefits: Symform: http://www.symform.com/ http://www.symform.com/ > Earn free cloud storage when you allocate unused space on your device for your Symform account. Users that contribute get 1GB free for every 2GB contributed. Contribution can always be fine tuned for your personal needs. Wuala: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/review-wuala-cloud-storage/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/review-w... > Extra space is available: Unlike the majority of online file storage services like Dropbox and Box.com, which offer paid plans only as a means to expand storage, Wuala offers you the option to gain additional online storage in exchange for some of your unused local disk space to commit to the network.

vertex-four 12y ago
> Shouldn't there already be a lot of existing tech for doing crowd backup/sync? There's bits and pieces, but essentially nothing that's open-source and community-supported.
- rawnlq 12y ago
  Just pointing out that P2P backup is a well understood problem (in industry and academia) and they should probably partner with people who do this stuff seriously or at least base their design on existing solutions. For example their implementation page right now is trying to do this with git-annex: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/git-annex_implementation http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g... which doesn't feel quite right...
  - db48x 12y ago
    One of the more interesting design requirements here is that the system should work even when the distributed content is _not_ encrypted. If I join this backup effort, and a meteor takes out all of SF (and thus the Internet Archive), and their off-site backups fail, and the aftermath is preventing me from accessing the internet, then that 1TB of data that I had downloaded is all still usable to me. It's not some giant encrypted blob, it's a bunch of zip files (or similar) containing images, sound, video, web pages, and other types of files that I can, in principle, already use. (Maybe I can't do anything much with that Apple II disk image, but I can at least identify it.) Git annex and BitTorrent would both work with that requirement, and most of the commercial, proprietary solutions cannot; their clients wouldn't use them if that data wasn't private.

by rawnlq 12y ago

vertex-four 12y ago

> Shouldn't there already be a lot of existing tech for doing crowd backup/sync? There's bits and pieces, but essentially nothing that's open-source and community-supported.

rawnlq 12y ago
Just pointing out that P2P backup is a well understood problem (in industry and academia) and they should probably partner with people who do this stuff seriously or at least base their design on existing solutions. For example their implementation page right now is trying to do this with git-annex: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/git-annex_implementation http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g... which doesn't feel quite right...
- db48x 12y ago
  One of the more interesting design requirements here is that the system should work even when the distributed content is _not_ encrypted. If I join this backup effort, and a meteor takes out all of SF (and thus the Internet Archive), and their off-site backups fail, and the aftermath is preventing me from accessing the internet, then that 1TB of data that I had downloaded is all still usable to me. It's not some giant encrypted blob, it's a bunch of zip files (or similar) containing images, sound, video, web pages, and other types of files that I can, in principle, already use. (Maybe I can't do anything much with that Apple II disk image, but I can at least identify it.) Git annex and BitTorrent would both work with that requirement, and most of the commercial, proprietary solutions cannot; their clients wouldn't use them if that data wasn't private.