It wasn’t until I was at altitude that I realized how much I have come to rely on the Internet for information. With the advent of the latest Macbooks, smaller solid state drives and no wired Ethernet, the location of knowledge is shifting. We used to go to the library and to books to access information. I know because when we moved form our last house I took trailer loads of data books to the dump.
The came the age of the hard drive…500M, 1TB, 2TB, it seemed like we just couldn’t find enough movies, TV shows and data to fill them up. There were a few years where a backup drive was under the tree every Christmas.
Now the data has migrated out of our immediate grasp to “The Cloud”. This concerns me a bit because if we loose our link, we loose our knowledge. Network connections and storage costs make cloud based storage the most cost effective solution.
Software developers has recently started migrating to GIT which is a distributed source control system. One of my co-workers was commenting last Friday that there was an attack on an open source web site where the entire site was destroyed. Because the site was a GIT repository, every developer had a complete copy. The site was back on the air minutes after the attack.
I know that cloud services like iCloud are redundant but what if we lost the Internet?
Having a backup system like GIT for the Internet’s content would protect our knowledge from hackers and make it available even when large parts of the network are off line.
Distributed computing has been around for a while in the form of co-operative programs that run in the back ground like (the gene mapping one). What if there was a storage project where you could set aside a percentage of your storage for Internet backup.
Then again, it would probably just be filled up with porn…
Aren’t our friends in NSA taking daily back ups of all our communications? If I lost all my emails, texts, chats, skype session, I would go to them for a copy!