[REBOL] Re: Mutually Assured Backup
From: jseq::mediaone::net at: 4-Aug-2001 21:40
I like this idea, and have been looking into it for awhile. A company
called Mangosoft had been doing this for LAN's. Their medley product set up
a virtual 'M:' drive on all PC machines in an office. While it looked like
a network share, files placed on the M: would be transparently mirrored to
multiple client hard drives so that they were always backed up. It didn't
sell well, and they've rewritten it to work in a similar fashion over the
Internet as a VPN/storage offering.
More ambitiously, there are a few other initiatives to implement shared
storage on a global level. Microsoft has a research project called FarSite
to take advantage of under-utilized client drives (
http://research.microsoft.com/sn/Farsite/) and some Berkely groups are
working on it as well:
http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/
For a powerful (looking - no experience here) script-based solution, you
might want to check out www.inter-mezzo.org - a free, perl-based (for now)
distributed file system for linux, commercially supported by Mountain View
Data, www.clusterfs.org, and others.
Also, I've used Groove successfully to mirror files around manually. It's
probably the most polished of the p2p frameworks, but one of the more
proprietary. It's super easy to mirror files without automation (drag and
drop when you remember), and theoretically scriptable via COM, but I get
headaches looking at their docs and have yet to make it through a tutorial.
I'd love to see it's file sharing tool integrated with version control with
scheduled images, but it's not clear when they'll make that a simple thing.
It would be wonderful to see REBOL/Express get out of beta, but I can't
imagine that REBOL could afford to sell it to you as an individual at a
price that made sense for both parties.
Anyway, that's the state of the art. All probably overkill for what you
want, but interesting nonetheless. For simplicity and security I'd say
you're better off with rsync/ssh which should be cross platform and robust
enough for your needs.
JS
http://www.pobox.com/~johnseq
