[clug] bittorrent and friends..

[Paul Wayper]

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Andrew Janke wrote:
| Hi all,
|
| Just wondering if anyone else out there has done this yet.
|
| A bunch of us all want to backup stuff.  We all have a fair amount of
| free quota each month, we all have a couple of hundred GB or so spare.
|
| So of course, why not play google and back up everything to each
| other, and use something like bittorrent to share the data about, then
| amongst the 7 or so of us things will always remain "synched".
|
| Of course then we can add in encryption (at the other site) in time
| but for now we are interested in just getting it going.
|
| Thoughts?  anyone set up a "private" torrent tracker before and have a
| handy PHP script or something to share?

I think perhaps a better solution is to set up a distributed file system or
distributed data store (see the Wikipedia entries for those two) that people
can join on invitation.  The file system would be set so that copies exist on
enough backup machines and you would simply write copies of your data to it.
If you don't trust the people to not read your files, encrypt your backups.

The selection of what file system and how many backups is 'enough' are topics
for considerable debate.  My research so far has looked at Coda, Ceph, GFS,
Lustre, OneFS, and PVFS, all of which aren't really suitable, as they're
designed for clustered file systems where the minimum interconnect is a LAN.
It might be an interesting experiment to see if we can set it up over ADSL in
Canberra, but it could also be annoyingly painful.

I've also looked at Wuala but while it's got the capability of private,
encrypted storage and does the whole 'cloud storage' thing, I don't see that
as a good alternative to a couple of people wanting to have a private backup
system.

More research required.  Anyone got a spare CompSci grad student?

Have fun,

Paul
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