A Peer-to-Peer Backup System with Incentives

Nowadays' digital life accumulates large amount of important data every day, for which safe storage is crucial. Most existing backup solutions are cumbersome and/or come with high cost, therefore most users never or rarely perform backup of their data of critical importance. Among the wide choice, archiving services are provided by data centers, although with the drawback of storing data often at only one central location managed by a single company. In the case of the site's destruction by natural disasters, or the company's bankruptcy the users' backup is inevitably lost. In order to solve the aforementioned problems, we introduce a distributed backup solution to create the possibility of highly secure and free backup in a scalable and user-friendly manner. This paper presents our proposed incentive mechanisms, and the design of our peer-to-peer backup system by describing the peer application's components. We show results of various experiments, performed on Planet Lab, and draw propositions about important system parameters upon them.