[ILUG] p2p Decentralised Backup

[Michael Jonker]

On 18/07/2012 11:24, Kevin Lyda wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Michael Jonker <michael at openpoint.ie> wrote:
>> I am researching strategies for decentralised backup solutions which are
>> economical, scalable, suitable for SMB's and Linux compatible. Ideally these
>> should also be FOSS.
> This is not p2p, but it looks interesting: http://www.tarsnap.com/index.html
>
> I'm not sure what p2p would bring. It's generally only a single
> machine at a single time that does a restore. If you have several
> machines likely to restore the same data at the same time, I see a win
> there for p2p, but not really for other things.
>
> Kevin
>
Tarsnap looks interesting but is essentially a (corporately) centralised 
service running on Amazon S3. I am taking a 'Mars View' look at a global 
storage system where millions of independent machines are running anyway 
with heaps of storage. Using this to provide an always on redundant 
backup system makes more sense for our species than hoarding data in 
huge centralised, power hungry, politically corruptible banks.

For a small to medium business (not prioritising 0 downtime at disk 
failure) the model could also make sense. In simplified principal you 
have a master disk of x capacity and a backup disk of x capacity. You 
give your x backup capacity to the p2p network and in exchange get x 
failsafe, redundant, off site storage at a known, fixed, low cost. Users 
(staff) can sync relevant work folders to the client machines from the 
p2p network (pretty much like Dropbox) - your whole information 
ecosystem redundantly backed up, synced and accessible at a 1:1 disk 
ratio. Sounds sweet until somebody points out the flaw in my logic :)