From flud

flud backup is experimental software, and is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, it has achieved some modest success for its ambitious goals, and is currently:

• 100% Decentralized
• 100% Free
• 100% Open

Additionally, flud is making steady progress towards a backup system that is:

• 100% Fair (nodes get as many remote resources as they provide)
• 100% Resilient
• 100% Private and Secure (in reality, nothing is 100% ever secure, and such claims are almost always made by fools. flud uses open encryption schemes that are predicted to remain unassailable for decades to come. Ensuring that the data you backup remains private has been a strong focus of flud since the beginning).

This release is appropriate for emulating flud networks on computers you control, or for backing up and recovering data from computers controlled by friends (see Private flud Networks).

Fairness and cheat-resistency have been a high priority since flud's inception, and are critical to making it possible to backup data to anonymous, untrusted peers in a reliable, fair, and resilient way. In this release, flud does not enforce symmetrical storage relationships among nodes, but the architecture and protocol fully support the implementation of that feature, which is planned for the next release (at which time we will make a big push to get some nodes running on the public internet at large). In other words, now is a really good time to give the software a spin.

Major new features in the 0.2.0 release included the following:

• RESTification of RESTish protocol (bumped from 0.1 to 0.2) (bug #75).
• Tracking of bad nodes (bug #67)

The 0.2.0 release fixes the following issues from 0.1.1:

• configurable mappings are now saner (bug #72), as well as saner behavior if there are problems with these values in the config file.
• fixes for an error path in client-side STORE
• fix import issue in fludnode

The 0.2.1 release fixes the following issues from 0.2.0:

• removal of crufty path checking code for server storage primitives (unneeded due to RESTificaiton)
• fixup of PrimitiveTestFailure system tests to support the above
• cosmetic fixes to internal protocol versioning
• fix for StoreFile in LocalPrimitives (import namespace problem not exposed in system tests)

Features:

• Convergent storage (also called single-instance-storage or content-addressable-storage) makes efficient use of storage resources
• Complete recovery of all data requires only that a user provide a single, compact credential (public/private keypair), i.e. as long as the user has this info printed out somewhere, or stored away in an email account, etc, they will be able to completely recover their data

Getting it:

• flud backup is available for unix platforms, and has been tested on several linux variants. rpms, src.rpms, debs, and tarball install are available, as well as svn access (Download).

Stuff that's missing (on the roadmap):

• statistical verify operation
• data expiration
• new protocol command to query for all data owned by a node (dht redundancy)
• samsara-like claims
• plugins to FludScheduler for native file change notifications
• nat-traversal / STUN [1] / STUNT [2]
• miscellaneous (bug list)
• testing on and appropriate porting to windows/mac
• protocol negotiations for resources