Storage grid in the sky - a new concept?

So, what if you take the principles behind BitTorrent (share more bandwidth to get more data) and put them as a way to store your own, personal data? You get something interesting.

Allmydata attempts to do just that - building a storage grid that can store your data, without a centralized storage server. For every 10 MB you offer on your harddisk, you get 1 MB free for your stuff on the Allmydata grid. Which means that your 1 MB is going to be replicated on 9 other machines on the internet (of course in encrypted form).

The advantage is that you do not need to worry about backups anymore. Or, at least in theory... :-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2006
  Please correct me -- I thought Microsoft's FolderShare was for the same solution. No?
  
  https://www.foldershare.com/
• Anonymous
  January 19, 2006
  Foldershare is different. In fact, there are various flavors of sharing technologies, starting with the Farsite project (http://research.microsoft.com/sn/Farsite), the xDrive technology that Microsoft bought from xDrive, FolderShare, and ending with the latest technology: the file sharing feature in Live Messenger 8.0.
  
  But all these techniques (including BitTorrent) are essentially sharing technologies. Allmydata is essetially different in the sense that it does not intend to achieve sharing, but only massive data redundancy (you give some space to others in order to allow others to replicate your data).
  
  Frankly, allmydata is an interesting concept, although the bandwidth is still the main bottleneck in this case.