Tahoe-LAFS: a P2P filesystem that lets you use the cloud without trusting it

Zooko sez,

Tahoe-LAFS is a p2p filesystem. You pool your spare hard drive space together with that of your friends. This forms a distributed filesystem which endures even if some of your friends' computers are unreachable. Everything is automatically encrypted, so backing up your files onto the distributed filesystem doesn't necessarily mean sharing the files with your friends. But, it is easy to share specific files or directories with specific friends.

It comes with a command-line interface and a web interface. If you choose, you can allow remote HTTP clients to connect to the web interface. We've configured our test grid to do that so that you can take Tahoe-LAFS for a test drive just by clicking here.

Please try it out and contribute bug reports! We are an all-volunteer project of Free Software hackers in the public interest. We need encouragement, love, and bug reports.

This looks like some exciting stuff! From the announcement:

In addition to the core storage system itself, volunteers have
developed related projects to integrate it with other
tools. These include frontends for Windows, Macintosh,
JavaScript, and iPhone, and plugins for Hadoop, bzr, duplicity,
TiddlyWiki, and more. As of this release, contributors have
added an Android frontend and a working read-only FUSE
frontend. See the Related Projects page on the wiki [3].

We believe that the combination of erasure coding, strong
encryption, Free/Open Source Software and careful engineering
make Tahoe-LAFS safer than RAID, removable drive, tape, on-line
backup or other Cloud storage systems.

ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Least-Authority File System, v1.6

(Thanks, Zooko!)

(Image: King Cloud, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from akakumo's photostream)