[jrsmith1279]

I was just thinking - Wouldn't it be great if there were some sort of site that allowed people to trade disk space to use the backup to a friend feature? The only problem I see with that is being a little uneasy about putting data in a stranger's hands (even with encryption). This might already exist, but if not then maybe I'll get bored and build it.

[derobert]

It'd need to be mirrored and striped over a lot of strangers, as otherwise a restore would be painful, as you'd be bottlenecked by the minimal uplink speed of the average residential Internet connection.

That plus encryption probably solves a lot of the privacy concerns, too. Seems like it should be doable.

Between people being offline, random drive failures, people leaving your service, etc., I wonder what kind of redundancy would be required. 5x? 10x? No idea.

I wonder how people would respond to the offer, "get 10GB backed up, but you have to store 50GB of other people's backups". I'm guessing that sounds pretty unfair to the average Joe (but its of course what the math requires should you want 5x redundancy).

[jrsmith1279]

Those are all good points. It would be something that you'd really have to stay on top of in order to ensure that your backups are happening. Bandwidth for restores would definitely be a big issue since the typical home only probably has around a 1 Mbps upload speed.

[intev]

You should checkout Wuala. I've been using them for a while and they let you trade or buy space.

[michaelcampbell]

You used to be able to use your own drive as space for others, in exchange for more space for you "elsewhere". Do they still do that? I thought they'd killed that idea.