[tahoe-dev] Proposed short description of tahoe-LAFS for personal backup

[Saint Germain]

Hello,

As explained before, I am writing an article on open source software
which include deduplication.

Here is how I proposed to describe tahoe-LAFS.

tahoe-LAFS is not really a backup software but rather a storage
solution. The primary objective is to secure your data, either for
privacy or for safety (against damage). To do so, it stores your
encrypted data (encrypted at the source) on several machines organized
in a network with a configurable policy (specifying K=2 and N=5 for
instance, will spread your data on 5 machines, 2 of which need at least
to be available to access your data).

A few remarkable points:
  - I like its "paranoid" approach. The idea is to trust no one (and
    especially not your online storage provider)
  - Don't need any redundant PAR2 checksum, given that the data are
    duplicated and spread on the network (I however recommend to make
    another backup on another media from times to times)
  - Community et mailing-list are very active and very helpful (post a
    message to see how welcoming they are !)
  - Documentation is excellent
  - You can join an already existing network (like VolunteerGrid2) by
    adding your machine. That way all members of the network will have
    access to a part of your (encrypted !) data et vice versa. It is
    quite a psychological jump to accept (you have to trust encryption).
  - You can also rent storage nodes to Least Authority Enterprises
  - No delta encoding but has deduplication at the source, however only
    on a file level.
  - Works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. I have however a few doubts
    on the Windows compatibility for managing locked files. But you can
    use Duplicati which uses Windows VSS and can use tahoe-LAFS as
    backend.
  - In case of backup interruption, resume is possible but you have to
    upload the whole file again.
  - Encryption is with AES-128 (soon to be combined with XSalsa20)


I would be very interested to have any comment. But please be aware
that I have to keep it quite short and simple.
Sorry for the bad translation from french !

Thanks,