21st century data backup

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

21st Century data backup. Truthfully to me this would imply storage in the form of cloud storage. What I think would be cool would be to have a group of users or studios get together and figure out a way to mirror their data on secure server shares. Example.... say 6-12 DUC members get together and build a "Mesh". Your chances of any single machine going down are minimal. The chance of losing the whole network would be almost impossible. The only drawbacks I see is keeping the individuals data secure and some type of effective non lossy compression. Given the price of 2TB drives it wouldn't be to hard to build something with enough capacity.

While not a replacement for local HDD backups something like this could take the place of the backup of a backup thats off site.
No reason that all of this sycronization could be happening automatically during idle time.

Think something like Mozy thats self administered.

Interesting idea. It would depend on the project, and probably how well you know the other people you are sharing the network with. I could see a risk if you are storing unreleased, not-yet-copyrighted, or stuff you signed an NDA for, but I think it could be a great way to have automated offsite backup between a small group of people you trust.

Of course there's a lot of stuff out there already that is not automated but fairly easy and painless to use. I do a lot of work with a programmer overseas, and we will often upload files to each other for remote backup. For a while I was using my slowbileme account, but we've been using dropbox recently and it's really easy for quickly sharing files.