TomS Words of Wisdom

With cheap used PCs running various flavors of Linux, inexpensive large hard drives and widely available broadband Internet connections, it ought to be relatively easy to set up Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks.

Basically I want to take a $75 used PC, throw a new $100 hard drive in it, plug it in to my home network and boot it off a Linux live CD. I'd like configure this system through a web interface, much like I configure other appliances on my home network. The main task of this system would be to automatically mirror data shared from my desktop and laptop computers.

I'd also like to install an identical node on my parent's home network to back up data from their computers and provide an off-site mirror of my data. (Okay maybe it needs two $100 hard drives.) Scale this up to a few more nodes, say a couple of friends and another relative or two, and we can start doing some RAID like economies by splitting remote mirrors across several nodes, with sufficient redundancy to recover the local node if a remote node or two is lost or off-line.

I think that the configuration parameters would need to include:

• Notification e-mail address and login password
  
• Unique host name (for use with dynamic DNS)
• List of local network share(s) to back-up
• Schedule for local network back-ups
  
• List of remote nodes to with which to peer
  including some sort of out of band encryption key exchange
• bandwidth throttling limits
  

Other interesting little details I've thought of include:

• Connections between nodes should be encrypted
• Provide optional encryption of mirror data on the remote node(s)
  i.e All data destined for remote storage would be encrypted before being sent. Only the local node would have the key necessary to decrypt. This should probably be turned on by default.
  
• Create small cross-platform applet to scan the local subnet and discover the newly installed back-up node(s) and launch configuration page in default browser
• Optional daily, weekly, & monthly statistics e-mail / web page.
• Optional merged mirroring for weekend commuters
  i.e. Two (or more) nodes could use a single list of shares to backup and a single two-way mirror set, ensuring that laptops that move from one local net to the other [/another] are protected.
• Nodes could optionally provide traditional file server functionality on their local networks
• Nodes could even provide file sharing services across multiple nodes. [Though this would likely get complicated as it would require a distributed real time locking system.]
  
• Node configuration data, including private keys, should be copied to a .zip file (or .tar ball) and burned onto CDs and stored securely (in say a home safe or safe deposit box). With any configuration changes the node should prompt the owner / admin to create a new configuration back-up file/CD.
  

I'd love to set something like this up on my own, but I'm still too much of a Linux newbie. So if there is anyone that would like to help me with this please let me know.

Once the software is up and running maybe someone like Linksys might be interested in selling a true appliance version off of retail shelves. Maybe a shoe box size device with power and Ethernet connections, hard disk, CD-RW drive, and a configuration CD.