[Gllug] Is there any demand for rsync based offsite backup?

[M.Blackmore]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 21:35 +0100, Chris Bell wrote:
> On Wed 01 Nov, M.Blackmore wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 18:40 +0000, Jason Clifford wrote:
> > 
>    Unfortunately I think it might grow rapidly. Perhaps we should club
> together and buy one of the nuclear bomb shelters, complete with their
> diesels, communications, aircons, etc.
> 
Heh heh heh perhaps not so stupid an idea ... but not the point I was
making here 

>    Archive storage should be easier than instant access, but technological
> advances would probably make it unreadable in no time. Magneto Optical was
> supposed to be the ultimate at one time, but I don't see many drives around
> to read it.
> 
The point about the Miasmic Aether Backup system, sort of a type of
freenet, is that the actual medium would be irrelevant. It would be live
on peoples' current storage, and multiply redundant, so that as people
backup and transfer onto whatever is the flavour of the current
decade/half decade (choose your generational turnover of technology
timescales!) the data just goes with them. 

So the issue of say, the Domesday project being unreadable by the BBC
'cos they forgot to save the optical disk drives (they found some in the
end I believe but it was a close shave) is thereby rendered superfluous.

However, the issue of growth of data stored and flows might be a
considerable problem. How much storage does 30 or 40 hours of baby and
granny before she snuffed it on digi video or converted tape to digi
take up? Thats the sort of stuff people will be wanting to make
"permanently safe" and it could be, well, exponential might be an
inadequate word.

However, with the size of storage growing and price dropping and the
collective unused storage available around the world the Miasma might
also be exponential in growth, way beyond the actual needs of most
people most of the time.

FFS people are buying 2x3ghz multicore systems as entry level for
running wordprocessors and email, and similar gross overkill of needs is
rapidly escalating for storage technologies bought off the shelf.

But how could one actually make a Miasma backup system actually work, a
la freenetty sort of way? I suspect for most people the nightly backup
will be small - few megabytes - but the overall data would end up being
stonking, hundreds of gbs, probably teras. How would a system keep track
of this all, scattered over tens of thousands of storage sites,
humongously redundant so that, say, Denmark disappears under the North
Sea in a cataclysm along with its 10 million Miasma netted computers and
no one notices any data loss 'cos there isn't any.

Hmmm. Perhaps this is where the Miasma turns into the ... oh hell whats
it called .. the Singularity? The global intelligence emergent.

'scuse me, any one hear a phone ringing??

(hands up those old enough to get that reference, eh?)

Malcolm
in muse mode
> 

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