Attributes
From flud
flŭd backup is easy, free, secure, private, and virtually indestructible.
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[edit] Easy
By providing reasonable default settings and a simple set-it-and-forget-it interface, flŭd will continuously backup your data without bothering you about it. Recovering data, even in the case where your original computer has been completely destroyed or lost, requires only a single identification credential.
[edit] Free
All centralized architectures have centralized operating costs: bandwidth, electricity, datacenter floorspace, and labor. All of these have to be capitalized on a continual basis. Centralized systems run on money.
flŭd is decentralized, allowing it to be 100% free. Each node is run by an individual participating in the network, and each node contributes some unused bandwidth and other spare resources to keep the system alive.
[edit] Resilient
flŭd is designed to survive not only hardware failures, network glitches, and malicious software, but also correlated failures and natural catastrophes. With flŭd, data is backed-up to geographically diverse hosts, each owned and operated by an independent entity. Instead of putting all data at one or two locations, it is spread across dozens, making it incredibly improbable that data will be lost even in the face of massive flooding, fire, earthquake, tsunami, economic turmoil, terrorist attack, nuclear strike, and if we are lucky, maybe even a planet-of-the-apes-style overthrow of our civilization.
[edit] Indestructible
Data backed up to the flŭd network (when fully instantiated) will be resilient to multiple failures, resulting in nearly indestructible backup.
Lack of a central controlling company, entity, or individual means that flŭd is dependent upon no one for its continued survival. Data backed up with flŭd is immune from the whims of market forces, the follies of failed business plans, or the foibles of human operator error present in centralized backup services. [see blog entry Eradicating Service Outages, Once and For All]
[edit] Secure & Private
All data encryption is done before data leaves your computer, and only you know the credentials necessary to restore your data. File data is encrypted with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), using a 256-bit key in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode. File metadata (that's the bits of info your filesystem maintains for a file: file name, owner, permissions, etc.) is encrypted with a 1024-bit RSA key. Note that many other online backup services do not encrypt file metadata, allowing information to leak via your filenames and other visible data.
Additionally, after a file is encrypted, only a small piece of it is stored at any one location. Even if an adversary were able to break the encryption (which is very unlikely for the forseable future), they would only have access to a small bit of the data (currently, 1/40th of a file).
[edit] **Disclaimer
flŭd is a work in progress. The above claims refer to the fully instantiated flŭd network, many pieces of which are still being built.