PROBLEM 

I am trying to solve off-site, on-disk backup problem in the Bay Area which is prone to earthquakes.

QUESTION 

Is anyone out there using bittorrent as a backup tool?

APPLICATION 

D-Link D323 2-bay NAS boxes (with bittorrent clients) run around USD 150 at the local store w/o drives. Plop in a couple of USD 100-1.5 TB's w/o any RAID configured. That's 3 TB or TiB (I never understood the difference. I have been to sites and read the words, but they flow way over my head). 

So, if a company has a dozen offices spread over a 100-mile radius territory, and we put, let's say 10 of these boxes - that is 30 TiB of raw space. Now, let's introduce redundancy.. let's say triple, so, 30/3 = 10 TiB for USD 3.5K. We can explore how much risk reduction has taken place with this redundancy...but that's a point for another time.

BENEFITS - fast backup, cheap SATA drives, reliable system - data is very safe in case of earthquakes, fires, power outages, theft, communication outages and easy to maintain - one box goes down, plug another one in and point it to the mother ship. Another benefit is by spreading around the backups, you can locate the systems within a high-risk area (of fire, earthquake, flooding, tornadoes, etc) and make it reasonably reliable and easily accessible (easy driving distance to go pick up the hard drive)

WHY POST THIS?

I am posting this message for two reasons:

a) Bacula and other enterprise backup tools do not particularly like unreliable bandwidth connections and a bittorrent-like technology fills the gap. The gap is that Bacula and other tools are making disk backups convenient. As people move away from tape, the disk-based systems are increasingly at risk from natural disasters and wear and tear over time. Thus increasing risk as compared to tape backups. Although they too are susceptible to wear and tear. Do you consider some sort of off-site as a natural cost of doing on-disk backups?

b) If someone is doing it or thinking about using bittorrent technologies - I'd like to know how of your experiences (and config files) and what hardware you use.

Mehma

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