[tahoe-dev] Proposed short description of tahoe-LAFS for personal backup
Greg Troxel
gdt at ir.bbn.com
Wed Jun 13 13:54:23 UTC 2012
Saint Germain <saintger at gmail.com> writes:
> tahoe-LAFS is not really a backup software but rather a storage
> solution. The primary objective is to secure your data, either for
I would call it "distributed filesystem" rather than "storage solution".
(Choice of nerdy rather than buzzword terms.)
> privacy or for safety (against damage). To do so, it stores your
loss, rather than damage. That may be a translation issue, but in
English I'd say loss because the emphasis is on servers that vanish more
than servers that have your file but have corrupted bits.
> 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)
To protect against bad blocks, a filesystem with ecc might make sense,
but failures are often whole-disk. So I don't disagree with you, but
"need" makes this seem black and white, whereas really we're talking
about probabilities.
Also, while tahoe works well, I don't think anyone thinks it is
reasonable to keep data only in tahoe. This is especially true if one
enables expiration.
> - 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.
It also works fine on NetBSD. It probably works on other BSDs.
I don't know what you mean about locked files. If you mean locking like
in NFS and lockd/statd, then I wouldn't expect that to work anywhere.
> - 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 !
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