This document is intended to disclose certain lines of thought, to prevent their development as proprietary or defensible intellectual property of any other party, and to prevent any future disclosure by other parties from being considered as novel. These have been independently developed by myself free of third-party claim. These are not abandoned, but may be pursued by myself at a later date. - Scott Small, 13 May 2003, approx. 11:30am PDT

A systems backup and distributed storage solution for commodity PCs can be constructed by layering encryption, network file system, and RAID technologies. In this scheme, each node would as a server share a significant percentage of its available storage to other nodes via network storage protocols like NFS, SMB, CIFS, AFS, etc. Each node would as a client provide for the presentation of a virtual drive that would be striped as a highly redundant RAID configuration across the remote shares. Traffic, authentication, and storage would all be encrypted in the preferred embodiment. This configuration would permit home users to back up the most critical data on their systems in a fashion that would survive local hardware failures that would otherwise corrupt local RAID arrays. High levels of redundancy and error correction in the storage scheme would reduce the risk of data loss to host inaccessibility. The same underlying mechanisms could be used to provide a location-independent storage scheme for mobile users. A system of timestamps, journalling filesystem support, and dirty/clean block tables would help ensure consistency of the array over time and survival of changes in individual node availability. The system should also have a mechanism for automatically remastering/restriping of data sets when the level of redundancy/protection falls below a user-definable threshhold. A distrbuted directory system could be used to track and advertise node and data set availability.