18 Jan
2011
18 Jan
'11
3:01 p.m.
cctech at vax-11.org wrote:
For a while now I have been pondering Usenet as a long
term, offsite,
distributed backup facility. Most of the premium servers are over two
years of archive, with pretty decent reliability. Spot checks of files
posted over two years ago still indicate 100% article availability.
I've been making that joke for years, but people normally don't find it funny ;-)
Comments?
The sheer amount of data will kill you, I suspect; I've always thought the
concept workable* for small amounts of data split over lots of messages on an
individual basis, but if lots of people are doing it and the 'files' being
posted are quite large, it'd become unwieldy and providers will start killing
messages (and accounts).
* from a technical point of view. I certainly wouldn't actually *do* it :-)
Even before the days of deja's archive, it would have been possible to
'refresh' data on a continual basis to get around issues of article expiry.
Sort of like a giant network-attached bank of DRAM.
cheers
Jules