Online Storage With a Twist 268
mssmss writes "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor — whose survival my storage depends on. It looks like Wuala has a way to do this, according to this story in the Economist. They use donated disk space of users to scatter your encrypted files over multiple computers."
Re:Online Storage scares me (Score:3, Informative)
The idea of having an intermediary overseeing any of my data just encourages me to go out and by an external drive or two.
Where do you store your external drives? If it's your personal items you're referring to, you probably keep them in the same house as your computer. Not much of a backup in the event of a fire/tornado/flood/etc. If it's for a business, unless you have offices in multiple locations, you probably keep them in the same office. So now if someone breaks your office's physical security, they have access to your backups as well.
I understand where you're coming from; it's difficult trusting someone to not abuse your privacy or hold your documents captive. I use online storage to back up things that have no "privacy" value per se. I typically just put out backups of my family photos and such.
Re:Nice idea (Score:3, Informative)
multiple copies just like any other good storage solution.
Re:Freenet (Score:4, Informative)
Only that hardly used data can disappear off the network. I assume in the case of this other offering, it never goes away.
Re:Nice idea (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds great, but what happens when a massive worm outbreak occurs?
Same problem as with regular storage. Have backups.
Re:No thanks... (Score:3, Informative)
The real issue isn't what would work in court, but what the media or HR people would do even without a conviction.
Don't think for a second that this is up for debate. You'll be publicly shunned and humiliated for a long time to come even if the charges are dropped or your found innocent.
Re:Nice idea (Score:4, Informative)
It may not fit... (Score:5, Informative)
...but it certainly is done. The projects I've found that do much the same thing are NOT being run by kids in their basement, but serious, large-scale research centers that need to do wide-area RAID.
dCache [freshmeat.net]
iRods
OPeNDAP [freshmeat.net]
PVFS [freshmeat.net]
TPIE [freshmeat.net]
Re:The part you get isnt usable... (Score:3, Informative)
I think you are doing it wrong.
You don't have 1/100th of the bytes in a file, you have 1/100th of the information needed to reconstruct it.
Unless law enforcement can find enough of the other parts, then what you've got it just garbage random data.
Re:The part you get isnt usable... (Score:1, Informative)
Only if it happens to be a contiguous chunk of the original file. If the data on your machine is just a series of 1s and 0s representing every 100th bit of the original file, it is just noise.