collaborative backup system?

[gusl]

Does there exist some kind of collaborative backup system?

Your HD could be partnered with a few other Internetted computers (or to be more efficient, use a checksum system like RAID) to make backups of each other (or just the most important directories). There could be a daily update of the changes made.

I think most people would want some sort of encryption, so that users of the remote computers else can't read their data.

Comments

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I think there is a lot of potential for abuse. You mentioned the encryption so the person at the other end could not read it, but what if you were backing up all your child porn on someone else's computer? If the user at the other end gets in trouble, and their computer gets confiscated, will your encrypted child porn get them into more trouble?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

The point of encrypting it is that *nobody*else* could read it. In particular, if you were backing up your child porn collection at someone's computer, nobody else would know what it was.

And even if they did, the user can argue that it wasn't his stuff.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

In your original idea, you mentioned perhaps having multiple backups on various computers. What do you think of splitting files and having partial backups on multiple system so no one has any complete files? This type of system would require even more computers for multiple backups, but it might help prevent people from stealing your data.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

What do you think of splitting files and having partial backups on multiple system so no one has any complete files?

That would be good, but there's probably nothing as good as noise.

Noise is inefficient, since everything would take up twice as much space. So it may be better to mix things up.

Say, if I had a secret file A and a public file B that I want to back up,
If B is highly-random (or highly compressed) and larger than A, I can encode A based on B so that it looks like noise. But for anyone who knows B, A is easy to decode.

The person storing A has no clue how I encoded A, and the person storing B has no idea I have used it to encode another file, and even if he suspects it, he wouldn't know where I use it.

[dusc.livejournal.com]

In preference to noise, you could create a virtual RAID across multiple systems. Forward Error Correction could be used to create multiple system redundancy. Compression and a 1 KB segment size would prevent any single machine from "accidentally" being in posession of porn, or other illegal content in a recoverable format.

This would seem to address the desired specs.

You'd need some simple propogation and caching methods for commands, like "Add" and "Delete", but the virtual raid could be self adjusting, allowing for the addition and removal of servers. I'd have to actually think about it to spec out a "good" approach for these.


For most things, I'd just email anything I want backed up offsite to a 1 GB free email account. Plenty of free splitters are out there for data > 10MB. Clumsy, but how often have most of us really used backup recovery for anything but source code?

[dusc.livejournal.com]

This suggestion is not intended to be an endosement of child porn, or any other illegal or even immoral materials which could potentially obstruct any future attempts to obtain a secret clearance.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

There's Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/). It's pretty much what you describe, except that it isn't actually designed as a backup system, but as a truly anonymous replacement for the WWW. Everything you post on Freenet is potentially accessible to anyone though, which may not be what you want.

Google came back with some other options too: Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.html), MMB (http://www.pensamos.com/mmb/) and Grouper (http://www.grouper.com/about/what.aspx).