

Asking for feedback on an idea: scatter storage across home computers - andrewstuart

Could this idea work?  Maybe someone has built it already?<p>The idea is that you run a storage server application on your home computer.<p>You get paid for storing blocks of data which are encrypted.<p>The more reliable and fast your server is, the higher you get paid.<p>Customer of the system submit a file to be stored which gets broken into blocks and stored across many home storage servers.  Customers can choose the amount of redundancy required -i.e. a block gets stored on 20 different servers across the world.  More redundancy costs more.<p>Any thoughts on whether this sort of thing might be practical?
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wmf
Yes, this was a popular topic of discussion around 2001. The net result is
that your home computer is so unreliable and has such little bandwidth that
its spare resources are worth zero. Specifically, repairing data lost due to
churn can easily consume all available bandwidth.

[http://www.slideshare.net/emery/tfs-a-transparent-file-
syste...](http://www.slideshare.net/emery/tfs-a-transparent-file-system-for-
contributory-storage-124607) (especially slides 21-23)

<http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/TFS.pdf>

<http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs>

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andrewstuart
10 years down the track are things the same?

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evgen
Worse. Systems are more likely to have an always-on connection than they were
ten years ago, but the amount of upstream bandwidth has not increased
proportional to the amount of data that users wish to store. Integrity
checking and replication will eat you alive. The best place for you to start
is the following paper from 2003 (check CiteSeer):

High Availability, Scalable Storage, Dynamic Peer Networks: Pick Two

If you can't figure out a way to get around the problems outlined in this
paper then do not waste your time. A built-in incentive/payment system is
_not_ going to solve the problems you think it will and is really the start of
another "and now you have two problems" koan. Trust me on this one...

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evgen
BTW, the answer to your "Maybe someone has built it already?" question is that
it was called Mojo Nation and as enticing as the concept may appear, it won't
work. MN does live on as the progenitor of BitTorrent and Tahoe-LAFS, but the
core idea of persistent, secure peer-to-peer storage across a dynamic peer
group is a fools errand.

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turbojerry
There are free systems that do this such as -

<http://freenetproject.org/>

<http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/info/overview.html>

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geekfactor
Check out CrashPlan: <http://www.crashplan.com>

~~~
evgen
CrashPlan has a friend-net mode, but this is an entirely different kettle of
fish than a truly dynamic peer network.

