Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS)
A DIBS is an interesting solution to the problem of off-site backups. Disk space is cheap, so storing backups is no problem. The problem comes in redundancy – what do you do if both your backup drive and main drive are stolen, destroyed in a natural disaster, etc.? Off-site backups are the solution, but until now, they’ve been limited to only the wealthy, or those with small enough backup needs to utilize online services. Enter DIBS…
With disk space getting so cheap (down to $1/GB), storage for backups should be no problem. I’ve built my own software RAID with two 120GB IDE internal hard drives set inside two Firewire enclosures, and it works great. If one of the drives ever fails, I can just purchase a new drive, pop it in, and recover the data from the mirrored drive.
But that does me no good if we have a fire, tornado or theft. With the DIBS I could use some of my extra space to backup someone else’s data, and they would do the same for me. The data is encrypted, so they can’t look at my data, nor could I look at theirs. Should disaster strike, I could recover from their backup.
Since the only implementation at this point is in Python, it’s still a geek thing. Heck, I’m not sure distributed off-site backups will ever be any thing OTHER than a geek thing. Let’s just say it’s a really hardcore geek thing. It would be nice to see a cross-platform GUI implementation – necessary to draw in a wider crowd of geeks. Without using it, I also see a problem in locating someone else to share files with.
Other questions also come up – what if someone was using this tool to backup pirated files? It could be another case of a promising technology being stiffeled by legal action.
But it is a very promising solution to the problem, and I definitely intend on investigating more. I’ll post my experiences as usual…
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