{"id":328,"date":"2011-09-30T09:54:14","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T23:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=328"},"modified":"2011-09-30T09:54:14","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T23:54:14","slug":"the-blocksnet-concept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=328","title":{"rendered":"The BlocksNet concept"},"content":{"rendered":"

I fired up BlocksNet<\/a> the other week when investigating some cross-platform, online backup options.<\/p>\n

BlocksNet is developed in Ruby and after some “bringing together” of the package and its dependencies for my Linux distribution it worked quite well.<\/p>\n

The BlocksNet concept raises an interesting question: should we trust P2P systems for secure data backups? BlocksNet is private as you control who you share data with – it can be one or a set of known nodes. And BlocksNet’s public TCP port is 1984…<\/p>\n

If data is scrambled across an arbitrary set of nodes and only retrievable from any node with the software running is it fundamentally more reliable and secure than a traditional star topology backup architecture? Moreover, could we trust our encrypted data to be spread across a public P2P network for even greater redundancy?<\/p>\n

Today more and more people are trusting Cloud backup services like Dropbox and Spideroak for their data storage so people are willing to give up control to third-parties, but P2P on the other hand is still a “dirty” abbreviation.<\/p>\n

It seems as though BlocksNet wasn’t designed for backups, but that is one interesting use case.<\/p>\n

Ideally, a P2P backup system would allow you to add directories to the system which are then propagated around the network and encrypted. Access from a local file manager is really a must if it is to be practical. BlocksNet is Web-based and I haven’t investigated whether it integrates with local file management tools.<\/p>\n

Anyone know of an open source, P2P backup app? I already use a star topology backup system but it would be good to have files accessible in a consistent way across all my Linux and Windows systems without having to continuously run sync tools. Further investigation is required.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it’s not a “backup” app that I’m after but something like iFolder<\/a> that maintains a persistent file state between nodes and a server. It would be good to have the server part optional.<\/p>\n

Something like: install the client on all nodes in your private network (LAN or WAN), designate shared directories, add each node to the network, enjoy automatic replication and fault-tolerance between all nodes. So no matter which computer you log on to you always have all your working files available to you. From there traditional point-in-time backups can always be taken. Snapshots and deduplication would be something that could be integrated but not necessary. This way you could use a central server but it’s not a single point of reliance – it’s just another node on the network.<\/p>\n

Something to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I fired up BlocksNet the other week when investigating some cross-platform, online backup options. BlocksNet is developed in Ruby and after some “bringing together”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-source","category-the-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}