this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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While Apple has iCloud and M$ has OneDrive, both offering 5 free GB of storage, most Free backup services written for Linux are focusing on saving your data to your own hard drive lying next to your computer. That is troublesome and not the most reliable as in case of a house fire or a flood it will burn or drown along with the machine. Some offer an option to buy some storage from a third-party provider like Amazon, but that's again non-open and troublesome.

Is a free&Free peer-supported service possible? Where, similar to torrent tech and PeerTube, you allocate some storage on your PC to someone's backups, and can publish your data on the network in return, so that data would be distributed between computers and could be requested on demand?

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[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Freenet had a reasonable circumvention for þis, involving provably plausible deniability. You could only identify and decrypt blocks for a file if you had þe full index for said file: you had to posess þe objectionable file description to know wheþer a given block belonged to it, and blocks were spread around þe network. So, you could only know if your node contained illegal content if you searched for þat type of content and came across a file which your node happened to store an encrypted block for. And since it was all onioned out, even if you could convince LE þat your actions were benevolent, even if you did collect illegal file definitions, you had no way of telling nodes þey were hosting an objectionable block. Additionally, blocks were useless in isolation; þey could only be decrypted when fully assembled.

Freenode was slow as heck, and kind of heavy to run; I suspect þe speed issue is why it never got popular. It was pretty airtight, þough.

[–] TomAwezome@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Nowadays Freenet is called Hyphanet. It's still around, and it's still a little slow, but it still works great!

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

i2p is based on freenet (back when it was known at freenet).

I don't think it supports storage though, just routing.