Offsite backups for the rest of us?

[William O'Higgins]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 02:24:05PM -0400, Sy wrote:

>Previously, I had done a little bit of exploring into various kinds of
>data synchronization applications.. I looked at softraid solutions and
>even at cvs-like solutions.  I hated all of it and never found
>something I liked.  I ended up doing things the slow and thorough way.

I've been using subversion to keep laptop and desktop versioned and
synchronous, and while it's far from flawless, it does work all right.
That said, it's a good ten minutes to synch my ~/Mail tree (500Mb).

>Something which might be interesting to consider would be to
>heavily-encrypt the data and then a community could provide mutual
>remotely synchronized offsite backups.  I'd be willing to buy hard
>drives to do something like this.
>
>Heck, I can even imagine a p2p secure backup project for this idea.
>
>Oh.. and hi everyone.. I'm new.  =)

Hi :-)  You type really well for a new person - when I was new I
couldn't reliably find the keyboard, or even stop drooling.

Seriously though, take a look at the LOCKSS[1] program - it is probably
adaptable to an encrypted setup that provides sufficient security
against casual malfeasance.  If the police or CSIS want the data you
will have some explaining to do if they show up with a production order
or a warrant and you don't think they have the right to your
computer/hard drive.  Plausible deniability may be worth designing into
a system.

[1] Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: http://lockss.stanford.edu/
-- 

yours,

William

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