The quantity of personal data has tremendously increased in the last years. Every family now owns one or more computers, plus smart phones and game stations, all connected to the Internet, with huge storage capacities (laptops are now sold with 250 GB, while iPhones can store 32 GB). As a consequence, our pervasive access to computers has lead us to generate and store more and more personal data on them: analysing a random computer will exhibit thousands of digital pictures and short movies, hundreds of emails, and many administrative papers (bills and payrolls, contacts lists, etc...).
However, most people are often not aware that they will, sooner or later, experiment crashes of their storage, and lose all or part of the data that they have not carefully protected in a backup. Backups are often not carried out seriously enough, or data is spreaded too much on different devices. Even the most serious ones are often not aware that their backups have limitations: home-recorded CDROM or DVD become unreadable after a few years; backups stored in the same place can be lost together with the original data (stolen, destroyed by fire or flooding, etc...).
As a consequence, personal peer-to-peer backup appears as a promising approach to solve this problem. In such a system, every user exchanges some free storage on his computer with the ability to backup his own data on other users computers. It offers the following nice properties:
The Palabre project aims at the design of a peer-to-peer backup system for personal data and small professionnal businesses. An open-source implementation (GPL) will be developed, deployed and studied.