first things first: Thanks for restic. It is great! My computer uses it every day
I have this crazy idea for a kind of spiritual successor to wua.la (for those who don’t know it was at one point in time an encrypted file sharing platform). I watched the tech talk and read the papers about it, but it was really complicated.
So my question is this: Could something like a restic repo be used by many different people at the same time? Could it scale to petabytes? Of course there would have to be a server component that does some bookkeeping and management and that would be fairly complicated as well, but could the repo format be a good starting point for a kind of distributed file system? I really like the content addressing and the chunking, but I fear distributing pruning could be a problem. What do you think? Maybe one of the devs could chime in.
Probably a dumb idea, but I would still like to know the reasons why. Thanks!
restic’s current design is suitable for terrabytes, but not petabytes. At that size the indexing just doesn’t scale. Restic is designed to work with some basic storage service, once you introduce a significant server side, it’s probably better to start from scratch and just pick the parts/concepts that can be reused.
Thanks Michael,
I really appreciated the answer. “Months in the coding editor can save you minutes asking knowledgable people ;-)” (Modern version of Frank Westheimers, 'a month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library)
