Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother, the man who probably has more redundant hard drives than he has pairs of socks.
Herman Poppleberry at your service. And hey, you can never have too many backups, Corn. One is none, two is one, and three is barely getting started. Although, after hearing the prompt our housemate Daniel sent over today, I might need to rethink my entire strategy.
Yeah, Daniel has been on a bit of a mission lately, hasn't he? He mentioned he is currently backing up over six hundred episodes of this very podcast. He is using Cloudflare for hosting, Wasabi for a secondary cloud bucket, and then syncing it all down to a local storage server.
It is a solid three-two-one backup strategy. Three copies of the data, on two different media, with one copy off-site. But Daniel is asking the big question: what if we could go beyond the big cloud providers entirely? He is looking into distributed file systems, specifically the Interplanetary File System, or I-P-F-S, as a way to achieve what he calls ultimate redundancy.
It is a fascinating jump. We are moving from trusting a few massive corporations to trusting a decentralized network of potentially thousands of individual nodes. But as with everything in the world of decentralized tech, the devil is in the details. Is it actually better for backups, or is it just more complicated?
That is exactly what we are going to tear apart today. We will look at the redundancy claims, the actual recovery process—because a backup is useless if you cannot get it back—and the legal and scaling headaches that come with putting your data out into the wild.
So let us start with the core concept. Redundancy. Most people think of cloud storage as this magical, indestructible place. If I put a file in Amazon S-three or Wasabi, it is safe, right?
Mostly, yes. Those providers have incredible durability ratings. We are talking eleven nines of durability in some cases. That means if you store ten million objects, you might lose one every ten thousand years. But the point Daniel raised is the single point of failure. It is not about a hard drive failing at Amazon; it is about the account itself. You get locked out, the company changes its terms of service, or there is a massive regional outage like the one we saw last year that took down half the internet.
Right, and that is where the Interplanetary File System comes in. For those who might not be deep in the weeds, how does it fundamentally differ from something like Wasabi or Google Drive?
The biggest shift is moving from location-addressing to content-addressing. In a traditional setup, if I want to find an episode of My Weird Prompts, I go to a specific U-R-L. That U-R-L points to a specific server at a specific I-P address. If that server is down, I am out of luck.
But with I-P-F-S, I am not looking for a location; I am looking for the thing itself.
Exactly. Every file in I-P-F-S is hashed. You get a unique fingerprint called a Content Identifier, or a C-I-D. If I want episode five hundred, I ask the network, hey, who has the file with this specific fingerprint? It does not matter who gives it to me, as long as the hash matches. It could be a server in Tokyo, a laptop in London, or a node running right here in Jerusalem.
So in theory, as long as one person on earth has that file pinned and is connected to the network, the file exists and is accessible. That sounds like the ultimate redundancy. But here is my first concern, Herman. If I am backing up my private data, say, my tax returns or family photos, I do not necessarily want the whole world to be able to find them by their fingerprint.
And that is a huge misconception people have about these systems. I-P-F-S is a protocol, not a storage service. If you just add a file to your local I-P-F-S node, you are the only one who has it. Other people can only download it if they know the C-I-D and your node is online. For a backup workflow, you would absolutely have to encrypt everything before it even touches the network using something like A-E-S-two-fifty-six. You would be backing up encrypted blobs. The C-I-D would just be the address for that encrypted chunk of data.
Okay, so I encrypt my data, I get my C-I-D, and I push it to the network. How do I ensure it stays there? Because if I turn my computer off, and no one else has requested that file, it effectively vanishes from the network, right?
This is where the concept of pinning comes in. In the I-P-F-S world, pinning is the act of telling a node, hey, do not delete this. Do not treat it like temporary cache. Keep a permanent copy. For a backup workflow, you would either need to run your own always-on nodes in different physical locations, or use a pinning service. There are companies like Pinata or Infura that basically charge you a monthly fee to keep your C-I-Ds pinned on their high-availability servers.
Wait a minute. If I am paying a company like Pinata to pin my files, haven't I just recreated traditional cloud storage with extra steps? I am back to trusting a single provider.
That is the sharpest critique of the current state of I-P-F-S. If you are just using one pinning service, you have not gained much redundancy. The real power comes from the fact that the C-I-D is universal. If Pinata goes out of business tomorrow, I do not have to re-upload my terabytes of data to a new provider. I just go to a different pinning service and say, hey, go find this C-I-D on the network and start pinning it. Or I could spin up my own server and do it. The data is not trapped in a proprietary silo. It is just out there in the ether, and I am just choosing who I pay to hold onto it for me.
That is an interesting distinction. It is like having a storage unit where the key works at every storage facility in the world. You are not locked into the landlord; you are just renting the space. But let us talk about the recovery process. Daniel asked what that actually looks like. If my house burns down and I lose my local server, how do I get my six hundred episodes back from the decentralized web?
It is actually a bit more nerve-wracking than a traditional download. In S-three, you just hit a G-E-T request and the data starts flowing at maximum speed. In I-P-F-S, your client has to query something called a Distributed Hash Table, or a D-H-T. It is basically a massive, decentralized phone book. Your node asks its neighbors, who has this C-I-D? They ask their neighbors, and so on.
It sounds like it could be slow.
It can be incredibly slow. Finding the providers for a file can take seconds or even minutes depending on the network health. And then, once you find them, you have to connect and start the transfer using a protocol called BitSwap. It is a bit like BitTorrent, where you can pull different pieces of a file from different peers simultaneously. For a large backup, like Daniel's archive, you would be pulling thousands of small chunks from various nodes.
And if those nodes have low upload bandwidth, your recovery time could be days instead of hours.
Exactly. And there is no service level agreement. If you are relying on the public network, no one owes you speed. This is why for professional workflows, people use private I-P-F-S networks or dedicated peering. But for a home user, you are at the mercy of the peers. The other thing is that you have to keep track of those C-I-Ds. If you lose the list of fingerprints for your files, you are finished. There is no forgot password button on the blockchain or the D-H-T. If you do not have the hash, the data is invisible.
So you need a backup for your backup's addresses. It is turtles all the way down. But let us move to the legal side of things, because this is where it gets really sticky. Daniel asked about content removal. Let us say he accidentally backs up something that he later gets a legal notice for. In a traditional cloud, you just hit delete, the provider wipes the sectors, and you are done. In a distributed network, how do you take it down?
Short answer? You don't. Not really. This is the double-edged sword of decentralization. If you push a file to the network and other people or services decide to pin it, you have lost control. It is like trying to un-ring a bell. You can stop pinning it on your end, you can ask your pinning service to delete it, but if some node in another country has cached it or pinned it, it stays alive.
That sounds like a nightmare for liability. If I am a business and I have a legal requirement to delete customer data after five years, can I even use I-P-F-S?
Technically, if the data is encrypted and you destroy the encryption key, the data is effectively gone because it is just noise. This is called crypto-shredding. But the encrypted blob still exists. From a strictly technical standpoint, I-P-F-S has no built-in delete button for the network. There is garbage collection on individual nodes, where unpinned data eventually gets cleared out to make room for new stuff. But if a file is popular, or if it has been archived by a third party, it is permanent.
And what about the gateways? Most people interact with I-P-F-S through web gateways, right? Like the one run by Cloudflare or the I-P-F-S dot I-O gateway.
Right. Gateways are the bridge. They let you use a regular browser to see I-P-F-S content. If a legal notice comes in, a gateway provider can block a specific C-I-D. So, if you try to visit that hash through the Cloudflare gateway, you will get a four-zero-four or a legal warning. But the data is still on the network. Anyone running a local node or using a different gateway can still see it. It is censorship-resistant, which is great for activists, but potentially terrifying for compliance officers.
It feels like we are moving toward a world where data is immutable by default, and we have to build layers on top of it to simulate the ability to forget.
That is exactly it. There are some interesting projects trying to handle this, though. Some systems use a layer called I-P-N-S, the Interplanetary Naming System, where a fixed name points to a C-I-D, and you can update that name to point to nothing. But the original data is still there if you know the original C-I-D. It is a fundamental shift in how we think about digital existence.
Let us talk about scale. Daniel's archive is significant, but it is not exabytes. Traditional cloud providers like Amazon handle truly massive scales of data. How does a decentralized network compare when we are talking about petabytes or exabytes?
This is where the physics of the network starts to bite. In a centralized data center, you have high-speed fiber interconnects between racks. You can move data at incredible speeds. In a decentralized network, you are limited by the slowest link in the chain. Managing a global hash table that indexes petabytes of data is a massive computational challenge.
So is I-P-F-S fundamentally different from the infrastructure of A-W-S, or is it just a different way of organizing the same old servers?
It is fundamentally different in architecture, but in practice, it often sits on top of the same infrastructure. If you look at where most I-P-F-S nodes are actually running, a huge percentage of them are hosted on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean.
Wait, really? So we are using a decentralized protocol that is running on centralized servers?
For now, yes. It is the path of least resistance. It is much easier to spin up a high-performance I-P-F-S node in a data center than to rely on people's home internet connections. So, in a weird way, if A-W-S has a total global meltdown, a large chunk of the I-P-F-S network might go dark too. Now, the protocol allows for a more resilient future where we all have little storage nodes in our houses, but we are not there yet. The performance just isn't there for massive scaling without some level of centralization.
That is the irony of it. We are building these complex decentralized systems to escape the big providers, but we are using the big providers to make the systems fast enough to use.
It is a transition period. But there is another piece to the scaling puzzle, and that is incentives. Why would I, a random person in Jerusalem, use my hard drive space and my bandwidth to store Daniel's podcast episodes?
Exactly. Unless I am a fan, I have no reason to help him with his backup.
Right. And that is where things like Filecoin come in. Filecoin is basically an incentive layer built on top of I-P-F-S. It is a blockchain where you pay providers in cryptocurrency to store your data for a specific amount of time. As of early twenty-twenty-six, the Filecoin network is actually hosting over fifteen exabytes of data. They have to provide cryptographic proof, called Proof of Spacetime, to show they are actually holding your bits. This creates a competitive market for storage.
Does that make it more like a traditional cloud provider?
It makes it a decentralized marketplace. Instead of one company setting the price, you have thousands of providers bidding to store your data. It can be significantly cheaper than S-three, sometimes by a factor of ten or more. But the complexity is much higher. You have to manage wallets, deal with storage deals, and handle the possibility that a provider might just disappear and lose their collateral.
It sounds like a lot of work for a backup. I mean, if I am Daniel, I just want to know that if my laptop dies, I can get my files back. If I have to become a crypto-economic expert just to manage my off-site storage, I might just stick with Wasabi.
And that is the reality for most people right now. I-P-F-S and Filecoin are amazing for certain use cases, like public archives, scientific data sets, or censorship-resistant websites. But for a personal backup workflow, the friction is still very high. You are trading convenience for a very specific type of sovereign redundancy.
So let us look at the practical takeaways. If someone listening is thinking, okay, I want to try this. I want to move my backups to a distributed system. What is the actual workflow today?
If I were doing it, I would start with a tool like R-Clone. We have talked about R-Clone before on the show, it is like the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage. It actually has an I-P-F-S backend. So you could set up a script that encrypts your files, hashes them, and then pushes them to an I-P-F-S node or a pinning service.
But you still need that pinning service.
You do. Unless you want to run a server at your office and a server at your house and have them peer with each other. That would give you a private, distributed backup. If the house burns down, the office has the blocks. If the office burns down, the house has them. And since it is I-P-F-S, if you need to add a third location, it is as simple as spinning up a new node and telling it to pin the same C-I-Ds. It would pull the data from the other two nodes automatically.
That actually sounds like a very elegant way to manage multi-site backups without needing a central coordinator. No V-P-Ns, no complex sync software, just the I-P-F-S daemon running and sharing blocks.
Exactly. That is where the technology really shines. It is the protocolization of storage. Instead of having to configure a specific sync relationship between server A and server B, you just tell both servers to care about the same content. The network handles the discovery and the transfer.
Okay, but what about the legal side we mentioned earlier? If I am using this for a business, how do I handle the right to be forgotten?
You have to handle it at the encryption layer. As we said, crypto-shredding is the only real answer. You store the data on the distributed network, but you manage the keys in a centralized or more controlled way. If you need to delete a file, you delete the key. The encrypted blocks stay on I-P-F-S forever, but they are useless. They are just digital noise. It is not a perfect solution for every regulatory framework, but it is the standard way to handle immutability.
It is like throwing a locked safe into the middle of the ocean. The safe is still there, but if you melt the key, no one is ever getting inside.
That is a perfect analogy. And as long as the ocean is large enough and the safe is strong enough, that is effectively a deletion.
So, looking at the big picture, does I-P-F-S provide ultimate redundancy compared to multi-cloud?
I would say it provides a different kind of redundancy. Multi-cloud protects you against a provider failing. I-P-F-S protects you against the concept of a provider existing at all. It is a more robust, long-term architecture for the human race's data. If we want our podcast to be findable in a hundred years, I-P-F-S is a much better bet than hoping a specific company's billing system is still running.
I like that. It is about the longevity of the data itself, not the longevity of the contract.
Precisely. But for Daniel's immediate problem, which is making sure he doesn't lose the archive of My Weird Prompts next week, a combination of Wasabi and a local N-A-S is probably more reliable because the tooling is more mature. I-P-F-S is still in that early, exciting, but slightly broken phase.
It reminds me of the early days of Linux. You could do amazing things, but you had to be willing to spend your Saturday afternoon fixing a driver.
Exactly. We are still in the command-line era of distributed storage. But the progress is fast. Every year, the D-H-T gets more stable, the gateways get faster, and the integration with tools like R-Clone gets smoother.
One thing that struck me in Daniel's prompt was the mention of massive scales. We talked about how I-P-F-S can be slow, but there is also the issue of deduplication. That is a huge advantage for scale, isn't it?
Oh, absolutely. This is one of the hidden superpowers of content-addressing. Imagine you have a thousand people all backing up the same operating system files. In a traditional cloud, the provider stores a thousand copies. In I-P-F-S, because the address is the content, every node that has those files is contributing to the same C-I-D. The network effectively deduplicates at a global scale.
So if Daniel is backing up our episodes, and someone else is also backing them up, they are essentially helping each other.
Yes. They are part of the same swarm. If Daniel's node goes down, his recovery client can pull those blocks from the other person's node. That is a level of cooperative redundancy that you just don't get with traditional cloud providers. You are not just a customer; you are part of a library.
That is a beautiful way to think about it. The internet as a giant, shared library where we all help keep the books on the shelves.
It is a very optimistic vision of technology. And I think that is why people like Daniel are so drawn to it. It feels more like the original spirit of the web. Peer-to-peer, resilient, and not owned by anyone.
But we have to balance that optimism with the reality of latency and complexity. I think my takeaway for today is that I-P-F-S is an incredible secondary or tertiary backup target. Use your traditional cloud for the stuff you might need to recover tomorrow. Use I-P-F-S for the stuff you want to make sure exists for your grandchildren.
I agree. It is the deep archive. The digital time capsule. And for a podcast like ours, where we are talking about these weird, evolving ideas, there is something poetic about storing it on a system that is designed to outlive us all.
Even the episodes where we just argue about your hard drive collection?
Especially those, Corn. Those are historical documents. Future civilizations need to know the struggle of managing sixteen terabyte parity drives.
God help them. Well, I think we have covered a lot of ground here. We looked at the content-addressing model, the reality of pinning versus magical storage, the legal headaches of immutability, and why we are still tethered to the big cloud providers even when we try to escape.
It is a journey. We are not at the destination yet, but the road is being built under our feet. And hey, before we wrap up, I should probably mention that if you are out there listening and you have your own weird backup strategies, or if you have actually managed to build a seamless I-P-F-S workflow, we want to hear about it.
Definitely. You can reach out through the contact form at myweirdprompts dot com. We love hearing how people are applying these ideas in the real world.
And if you are enjoying the show, whether you are on episode one or episode six hundred and twenty-six, we would really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach new people who are just as nerdy as we are.
Yeah, it makes a big difference. We are available on Spotify, and you can find the full R-S-S feed and all our past episodes at our website.
Which, for the record, is backed up in at least four different places now. Thanks to Daniel.
At least. Alright, I think that is a wrap for today. This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. Thanks for joining us in the living room.
Stay curious, and keep those backups redundant. We will talk to you next time.
Goodbye everyone.
