Mutually Assured Backup

I find myself in the following situation: I have plenty of drive space and a resonably fast DSL connection for a flat rate. There are a few files on my drive that I would really hate to loose. What is the easiest way back these up off-site? The files are private so I would need to encript them. A solution that keeps popping into my head is to use Rebol/View/Pro, of which I am a proud owner, to back up my encripted files on the computers of several friends who also have an "always on connection" such as DSL or a cable modem. I should be able to request my files at any time. Since there is a chance that someones computer may be off-line, I would back up the same file on several hosts. This would be a classic peer-to-peer solution. Perhaps Rugby can be used to connect the peers. Is anyone out there looking for a similar solution. I would appreciate any feedback. -- david

On Sat, Aug 04, 2001 at 09:40:17AM -0700, David Vydra wrote:

> A solution that keeps popping into my head is to use Rebol/View/Pro, of > which I am a proud owner, to back up my encripted files on the computers of > Is anyone out there looking for a similar solution. I would appreciate any > feedback.

>Actually if you are going to be backing up the file on multiple locations >at once this is not really a P2P solution this is more of a P2Multicast >type setup you are talking here which is quite cool. It does not seem like >it would be a very hard solution to setup. Actually no more than a couple >hundred lines of code, if that. > >B

Two parts in your problem: 1) encrypt / decrypt files locally, see the script library, crypt.r 2) putting / getting them 2) With rugby: write to func's, get-file: func [ name ] [ return read/binary to-file name ] put-file: func [ name content] [ write/binary to-file name content ] serve [ get-file put-file] This will allow you to do a: read %test.doc rexec reduce [ 'get-file "test.doc" a ] which should work. Rugby allows message sizes to 99,999,999 bytes, but it is all in memory and does a compress before it sends. So for large files you may want to send and read in parts of files, with a func append-file and get-chunk or so. A bit of experimenting with the above funcs and some files in different file size should give you an idea what the max file / chunk size is (and please let us know as well!), although it probably depends on your hardware configuration as well. If you use Rugby this way you get error handling and message integrity, and if you have /Pro built-in security. I more or less put in the large message size to help sending files (at least in parts), but I never had the time to experiment with the maximum size. With a bit of fantasy you see how ease it is to build the next Napster, Gnutella, Groove or so..... --Maarten

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