Backup Community Idea


alxbrun

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Many of us are using Sync as a Dropbox replacement. The problem is that without an external peer (= physically external to my home that can be burglarized, burned, etc.), there is no true backup. I'm considered renting a box on OVH/AWS/Digital Ocean etc. but that's super expensive.

 

One solution is peer to peer backup: I send you an key (with encrypted permission only, of course), you send me yours, and we both serve as the other remote backup.

 

The problem now is that I have to find a "peer" to do that. Ideally I want to roughly match the data size and the bandwidth as well ("live" folder as opposed to long term archive that rarely changes).

 

Has anybody heard about such a community? Maybe based around a simple website that would match peers. If not, what features do you think would important? Is there any major issue I forgot?

 

Thanks,

A.

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Have a look at this thread.

 

Thanks for the link! The suggested solutions in that thread are:

http://maidsafe.net/

http://storj.io/

http://www.symform.com

All of these are full solutions/products by themselves, they try to solve much more than what I have in mind. More problematically, they don't use BitTorrent Sync or at least don't integrate nicely with it. I don't want a something that replaces BTSync, I want something that synchronizes some of my BTSync folders externally.

 

Basically it would work this way:

- I need to backup a total of 50G for instance

- The service finds a peer with the same need

- We exchange keys (with encrypted permissions only) and sync each others data

 

The key value is not the always-on aspect, it's the secure backup.

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If your main purpose here is backup, I wouldn't go with BTSync. Although I'm a fan. Syncing is not the same as making a backup.

 

I use Crashplan for peer-backup.

The personal edition is a real backup solution, scans for new files, encrypts them and uploads them to your friends.

Without CrashPlan Cloud storage. 

 

I see my friends backup as one big encrypted file. So basically we provide eacht other storage, outside our homes.

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If your main purpose here is backup, I wouldn't go with BTSync. Although I'm a fan. Syncing is not the same as making a backup.

 

Here here!

 

 

I see my friends backup as one big encrypted file. So basically we provide eacht other storage, outside our homes.

 

And you can set a storage quota for each peer.

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CrashPlan looks neat, but still:

  • You have to "manually" find peers among your friends;
  • and worse, you have to install and trust commercial software (my main concern being that CrashPlan itself be hacked and backdoored by a third-party). Such a risk a much, much lower with BitTorrent.

I know that BTSync is sync, not backup, but still I think we could build a neat P2P backup service on top of it.

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On top of it? Yes, that would be great!!!

 

Idea?

On top of the BT Sync API with another client, not just for folder/key pairs and monitoring folders (new and changed files), but also:

- Keeping older versions.

- Keeping deleted files.

- Going back to a 'snaphot' a month ago, a year ago etc.

 

As for the 'community' part: 

It would require a system to automaticaly detect the storage I need and the storage I host for others.

If I needed a backup for 5 GB, with a 4 times replication, I could offer 20 GB myself.

 

And on top of that: reporting about the 'health' status for my backups. When 4 strangers (hosting my backup) go down at the same time, I can't recover something. etc.

 

Something like this would be neat I think.

 

A more generic approach (not operational though) is The Ethereum project.

https://www.ethereum.org/

 

I uses blockchain technology to exchange value. In this context the value would be 'storage'. Same as http://storj.io/ you already mentioned.

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