Redbackup: A Redundant Distributed Backup System Prototype

Today, most individuals and small enterprises have a limited choice of how and where they backup their data.

One possibility is via local storage media, for instance using external hard disk drives. This requires considerable administration and may lead to a single point of failure, since location redundancy requires extra effort. A second possibility is to use cloud backup storage. This may lead to issues of privacy and a high dependency on third-party providers.

There are no easy-to-use distributed backup systems with private data storage on the market today.

In this study project we propose a redundant distributed backup system to address this issue.

The architecture of this system consists of backup nodes which exchange data using a peer-to-peer protocol, as well as a client application that creates and restores backups. A management system has been introduced to allow users to manage multiple backup nodes.

As a proof of concept, a prototype of the proposed client and node applications with a reduced feature set has been implemented in the Rust programming language.