[tahoe-dev] Stupid question: How can I keep my own data private?

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Jim Dorrington
<jdorrington at compuguide.info> wrote:
> Having spent the past three days reading up on Tahoe-LAFS and successfully
> installing it on Ubuntu, I’m afraid I’m still nowhere near achieving my
> goals, perhaps because I may have misunderstood it’s purpose.
...
> Simply stated I would like to be able to backup and retrieve my data from
> “the cloud”.

It really sounds like our documentation is badly flawed!

Because what you intend to do is one of the primary use cases that
Tahoe-LAFS has always been designed for, and which it currently can do
quite handily, if you know how.

Greg already asked you for more details to help us understand what you
tried or didn't try. Please answer as thoroughly as you can, because
it sounds like we need to improve the documentation, but I don't
currently understand what went wrong.

Thanks!

...

Oh. Oh dear, I think I know what happened. I'll bet you used the
public test grid gateway, which is linked to from the front page of
http://tahoe-lafs.org, and you uploaded your test data to the publicly
shared directory there. Then, you saw that you were able to download
files that other people had uploaded into that directory.

Am I right?

This definitely indicates a need for improved documentation and/or
improved publicly-visible demo. Let's wait to find out if my guess is
right, and anything else you can tell us, before we figure out how to
improve it.

Regards,

Zooko