Background

This is a project to try and identify suitable tools that will allow us to implement a distributed backup infrastucture. Distributed backup is a step forward from “common” server-based network backup to a serverless distributed backup system that allocates backup data across the whole network or in this case, internet. For the users this would mean donating, say 10Gb to the 'pool' and receiving a similar amount back as distributed storage (it's not quite as straight forwards as that as will be explained at a later date. As it's for personal information, a few criteria should be met.

* All data should be encrypted during transmission

* All data must be encrypted when stored

* An adequate level of redundancy should exist

* A fair method for trading storage and bandwidth must be used

Additionally, any tools must be under a suitable open source licence. It would be great if people could look at projects, evaluate them and document their findings on this page

The Candidates

DIBS

* http://www.mit.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/index.html

Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) - started in 2002 by Emin Martinian and written in python. It is well documented, installs fine under lucid, works fine on my small intranet of 4 machines, but has no GUI. It also appears to be completely dormant. The code is freely available and the licence appears to be open source compatible.

FLUD

* http://flud.org/

DIASER

* http://diaser.org.uk/

tahoe-lafs

* http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

Having looked at the site for tahoe-lafs, I'm not sure if it's quite what we want. The others automatically give two-way sharing with the storers; this is only one way. One of the others is probably a better choice.

backupp2p

* http://backupp2p.pbworks.com/