Ori - A Secure Distributed File System

[warri]

Just stumbled over a news article about Ori (A Secure Distributed File System) which has been developed by researchers at Stanford.

Ori replicates file systems across devices, making it trivial to recover from the loss of a disk. It provides both explicit and implicit versioning, making it easy to undo changes or recover from accidentally deleted files. Ori provides the illusion of instant replication and synchronization, even as data transfers proceed in the background. Finally, Ori introduces grafting, a technique that preserves file histories across file systems, simplifying the process of reconciling changes after sharing files.

In their paper, they list ZFS as one other relevant archival file system:

WAFL and ZFS operate at the block layer, whereas Ori works on top of an existing file system at a file granularity.

Sounds like an interesting concept and a nice alternative to all the various, incompatible cloud services (and their syncing algorithms...). I haven't read through the whole paper yet, hopefully I'll find some time later in the afternoon.