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How about PAR and peer-to-peer?

Mike James
2002-05-15
2002-11-28
  • Mike James

    Mike James - 2002-05-15

    I don't know if I read this somewhere or just dreamed it after a long night of drinking, but...

    Do you think it would be possible to create a system that would backup a disk across a peer-to-peer network? Such that, if my harddrive failed, I could recreate the whole thing from a peer-to-peer network, even if some of the PCs on the network were off-line?

    Just wondering...

     
    • Scott Dial

      Scott Dial - 2002-05-15

      There is a program called rsync for mirroring file systems across networks. The only thing you would be lacking is the boot records and partition information.

       
    • Mike James

      Mike James - 2002-05-18

      rsync looks pretty close to what I was imagining. I think I had an idea that a person could do something like RAID striping of their hard drive across a peer-to-peer network (like GNUTella or Napster). I think this would be interesting for a couple of reasons.

      A lot of folks have extra storage space - especially on my company's network. In a corporate environment, we could probably get people to leave their PCs on all night so that backups could occur during off-hours. And, of course, if your HD crashed, it could be restored from the network. Using RAID or parchive would ensure that a complete restore could be done even if some PCs were off-line.

      ...just fantasizing...

       
    • Douglas Napoleone

      Actually Veritas Netbackup is the best bet, and not it doesnt require that you use tapes as the end backup media. It wourks quitet nicely with Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN)

       
    • Douglas Napoleone

      Update: Semantic Ghost 2003 is out. this software saved me when my laptop HD started to die last week. I was able to peer over the network to a fiirewire external drive with a new laptop drive in it of all things.

       

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