RentFS is a conceptual idea to use bittorrent agents on disparate nodes, an logical agnostic networked loosely termed file-system / backup along the lines of ccgfs and dustFS or DropBox.

The theory using a federated transport, bittorrent, on each node it will propagate all the files to each other.

This idea had been lingering since my tenure at Citigroup, 2006 when i had commented to a colleague that our building house five thousand plus workstations that had a minimum of 80 GB of disk storage (10 GB for the OS) 

(5000 X 70)÷1024 = 341.796875 terabytes

and we marveled at what a shame all that surplus storage is going to waste.

Then again, this weekend I spent the better part of collecting and merging gigabytes of backups from systems and system reloads over the last few years and filing photos, code and projects into single (and rsynced backup) location.. and was reminded once again about the decentralized storage whim from when I worked at Citigroup.

It had struck me.. I have four main systems in my house, My Powermac, the wifes PC , my son’s PC and a linux server. Why not set up a “hot” folder where each node has a designated folder that is torrented out to each other node, duplicating the files to each others system and storing a copy on each other system all without the need of a master server that requires backups and coddling. Being completely for internal network use security is not a factor.

Simplicity is key in this idea.

Requirements:
- platform independent ? (bittorrent is available to all platforms)
- nodes must have capacity
- nodes will use exact same configurations and hostnamed hot directories (folder)
- all internal, perhaps mDNS for new nodes?

Goals:
- all files dropped on the host’s hot directory will propagate to each others shared directory
- simplicity
- redundancy

There are other systems and solutions out there based on push pull, rsync + lsyncd, iNotify, etc but not all are platform friendly.

more to come…