Backup is a huge challenge for small and medium businesses. Tape drives are expensive and to really safeguard data you have to send it offsite. Add to that the risk of information disclosure and backup becomes a real headache. Online storage seems to be the answer, but how do you trust a third party with your data?

Well... you don't: You give them an encrypted copy that only you can read. Better yet, create multiple encrypted copies and spread them around multiple providers ensuring that you can reconstruct the data from a subset of all the copies. A bit like RAID: A redundant array of inexpensive storage providers (RAISP?). Throw some P2P in the mix and you can also include disk space on millions of home computers (or co-worker laptops) in the storage equivalent of SETI@Home.

The New York Times is reporting on ClearSafe, a startup open-source company developing a distirbuted encrypted P2P storage solution.

The concept of massively distributed and encrypted storage has been around for a while. I first came across this concept when HiveCache was announced. Today HiveCache seems to be just a placeholder but you can still find in on the Internet Archive.

Other open source projects with similar goals include Distributed Internet Backup System, iDIBS (PDF of academic paper) and pStore

The market is ripe for commercialization of distributed online storage systems, especially for the use of small to medium businesses.

I can clearly envision a time when distirbuted storage is so abundant that you just throw your data into a global "bucket". By manipulating the ratio of required/available chunks of data you will be able to determine how "available" you want the data to be. For example, for critical data I might want several robust copies (in nice corporate data centers). For less important data I might be satisfied with a few hundred copies on the C: drive of strangers (or my co-worker's laptops). While the former might involve some monthly charge, the latter arrangement might be a barter: 100GB of space on my drive for 1TB of ad-hoc distributed space.

With cheap bandwidth and cheap disk, online storage is an increasingly enticing solution.

Check out Nemertes Research on Information Stewardship which covers the whole lifecycle of managing data including: Information Protection, BCP/DR, Information Lifecycle Management, Compliance and Data Quality Management.