Re: [Archive-access-discuss] request for comments about a project proposal

[Alex O. <aos...@nl...>]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Gomes <dan...@fc...> writes:

> The main idea is to enable Internet users to provide storage space
> from their computers to replicate a relatively small part of the
> archived data.

Have you considered any incentives for users to contribute to the
system?  While distributed computation projects (SETI@home, Folding@home
etc) offer some sort of bragging rights about how much data you've
processed, they make use of an idle resource which can never "run out"
(forgetting the electricity bill).  With backup storage, once you've
filled up a disk, that's it, you can't contribute any more.  Also
"curing cancer" and "advancing science" sound a lot more charitable than
"storing backup copies of old websites". ;-)

An alternative model which is a bit fairer to users is a peer-to-peer
distributed backup system, where users trade their local storage space
in return for having their own files backed up by the community.  Thus a
web archiving instution would be just another user.

However, while there's plenty of discussion and academic papers on
peer-to-peer backup I wasn't able to find any projects that have really
taken off outside the traditional realms of file-sharing (Bittorrent,
Gnutella etc) and anonymity (Freenet).  There seems to be just a couple
research projects and a hobbyist one in early stages of development,
which is a pity.

http://flud.org/
http://myriadstore.sics.se/
http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/

Cheers,

Alex