DIBS

I came across DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System, a few days ago. Here’s an excerpt from the program overview:

Since disk drives are cheap, backup should be cheap too. Of course it does not help to mirror your data by adding more disks to your own computer because a fire, flood, power surge, etc. could still wipe out your local data center. Instead, you should give your files to peers (and in return store their files) so that if a catastrophe strikes your area, you can recover data from surviving peers.

Given my propensity to backup everything, this doesn’t look like a bad option. In a sense, I’ve been doing what DIBS suggests for a long time — encrypt vital information and save it in multiple physical locations. However, DIBS goes one step further by requiring me to store others’ data on my machine. I’m definitely going to look into this after I move to Mac OS X and have researched the encryption side of it a bit further.

Anyways, enough lollygagging; I have to head to my digital design lab. Yay! (the sarcasm should be obvious)