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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/SirEDCaLot on 2024-04-01 09:11:39.

I was in another thread discussing how IA is a single point of failure, but that got me thinking about how to better distribute data to make it censorship-resistant or delete-resistant.

Many years ago when people left their computers on 24/7 (before sleep worked well and power was expensive), there were screen savers- animations that’d play on the screen to prevent CRT burn in. Some were basic, some were quite elaborate and required significant CPU power. A few researchers got in on that and the result was distributed computing projects like Seti@Home (analyzed radio signals for signs of aliens), Folding@Home (ran protein folding simulations to try and find cures for diseases), etc. There were a bunch.

As computer sleep modes started to work well, and power got more expensive, these fell out of fashion as people didn’t leave their computers running 24/7. But the idea was a good one.

People like us almost all have a server or NAS running 24/7, usually with no spin down time. We’re all (hopefully) running some sort of redundant RAID. So why not have a way to donate either free array space, or a hot spare drive itself? This software would ensure that the user’s needs come first, and distributed data would always be dumped in favor of user data. Or if a hot spare drive, if the main array lost a drive the hot spare would instantly kick in and rebuild so the real array overwrites the distributed storage data.

The key with this is it has to be 100% safe, and 100% brain dead easy.

I think such a system should probably start with the guts of BitTorrent or something like it so others can retrieve the data without the user needing to forward a port.

There should be a way to keep it anonymous, IE only allow download requests via TOR.

It should be secure- whole thing runs in a sandbox.

And it should be user controlled- the operating user can optionally select what sort of stuff they want to host. So for example I could say I want to host early Internet images not subject to copyright disputes, I want to allow 5mbps upload maximum to anyone who wants the data, I want to allocate my whole 22TB hot spare, etc. The central server would know who has copies of what and who’s willing to share what with whom.

The immediate result of this could be mirroring large parts of IA itself. However the system overall could also be used by other websites or groups (including businesses) as a sort of reliable distributed storage system.

Thoughts?