Flŭd backup

Contributor:Aarti S. Nair

INTRODUCTION

Flŭd backup is a completely decentralized system for creating and maintaining online backup of data. Its unique architecture allows it to provide nearly infinite backup resources for free, in a way that is virtually immune from failure.

flŭd is completely decentralized. There is no central server or authority, no controlling company, organization, or individual. All participants in the flŭd network share resources using an enforced fairness mechanism; in order to gain storage resources, a participant must provide resources. These sharing relationships are symmetrical and cheat-resilient, and are sometimes referred to as smart contracts. flŭd backs up your data by pushing encrypted pieces of each file to a multitude of other computers running the flŭd protocol, using techniques that can produce the most resilient and secure data archival mechanism for free.

In order to tolerate a massive failure of participating nodes in the flŭd network, erasure coding techniques are used to protect data. As of January 2007, these techniques allow virtually all data to be recoverable from the network even when nearly half of the nodes have failed. The generous erasure coding techniques employed by each flŭd node should allow even such unlucky participants to recover all data .

Individual nodes in the flŭd network are allowed to use any methods they choose to make decisions about where to store data and with who to enter into resource-sharing relationships. This agency allows for diversity in storage strategy. The flŭd backup prototype maintains localized trust records, which serve as a history of action of other known agents. These trust metrics are used to decide which nodes are most reliable, and each node tries to maximize its interactions with highly reliable peers while minimizing those with less reliable peers.

The main attractions of Flud backup are:

1. Free : flŭd is decentralized, and one of the main benefits of this is that there are no central operating costs.

2. Resilient :flŭd is designed to survive not only hardware failures, network glitches, and malicious software, but also correlated failures and natural catastrophes

3. Indestructible : flŭd is immune to the foibles of human operator error present in centralized backup services.

4. Secure and private : All data encryption is done before data leaves your computer, and only you know the credentials necessary to restore your data.

5. Easy : Flŭd provides reasonable default settings and a very simple set-it-and-forget-it interface. Recovering data, requires only a single identification credential.

SCOPE & UTILITY

• The center of gravity of computing has been moving away from centralization for several decades. All of the decentralized computing resources provide an incredibly diverse and resilient platform for creating the next generation of software and services
• targetted squarely at individual end-users and the small office / home office. As such, the software is very simple to install and run. No technical expertise is needed. No servers need to be installed or maintained. No tech support staff is required.
• indestructible backup. Neither flood, famine, hurricane, nuclear strike affecting many nodes in the flud network, nor the complete failure or death of the flud backup software team (or supporting company[ies]) will render flud backup unusable.
• out-of-the-box working. If the user does nothing more than just install the software, it should have reasonable defaults for backing up important data (home directories, MyDocuments, etc). No configuration is required (though customized configuration is possible).
• flŭd has been designed to encourage the richness of diversity. The software is open.