[Tails-dev] Tahoe-LAFS persistence

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Author: David Stainton
Date:  
To: tails-dev
CC: Callme Whatiwant, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn, Zancas Dearana, Leif Ryge
Subject: [Tails-dev] Tahoe-LAFS persistence
Hi,

I need your input, ideas and suggestions with regards to Tahoe-LAFS +
Tails integration.
The Tails trac ticket is 6227, https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/6227

I propose that the Tahoe-LAFS + Tails integration would involve these
4 components:

1. the Tahoe-LAFS debian package:

This part is done. Great!


2. Tails persistent volume assistant feature additions:

Right now the Tails persistent volume assistant has a user configurable
list of persistence futures which correspond to sets of files that can
be persisted.
The user can selects which to persist or not persist.
For each of these items there should be a third option: "persist to
Tahoe-LAFS grid and persist to local volume".

The persistent volume assistant should also prompt the user for some
information on how to configure Tahoe-LAFS.
Not all users will want to use a "Tahoe-LAFS onion grid", a grid only
accessible via Tor Hidden Services,
because of the huge performance hit and the unreliable situation that
arises when storing your ciphertext blobs
on anonymously hosted storage servers.

LeastAuthority's S4 hosted Tahoe-LAFS service is an excellent option
for Tails users.
https://leastauthority.com/
However, at this time LeastAuthority does not accept bitcoin... credit
card only.

3. periodic Tahoe-LAFS backup scheduler

This daemon could be part of Tahoe-LAFS... there is nothing Tails
specific about it.
It should have some clever heuristics for scheduling the next Tahoe-LAFS backup.
For instance it could use Linux's inotify to detect when a directory
tree has been modified.
It performs a backup every X minutes if data was modified.
It would use the "tahoe backup" commandline tool creates the backup.


4. Tahoe-LAFS backup GUI applet
- allows the user to execute an on-demand Tahoe backup.
- Informs the user of the current Tahoe backup state;

The three backup states are:
a. synced
b. not synced and no backup in progress
c. not synced and backup in progress

This auto backup scheme would not be useful for the case when a user
wants to persist data that will not also be copied to the Tails
persistent volume.
There could be various reasons for this situation such as the data set
is too large to fit on the persistent volume...
For that use case a user would need to run some tahoe commands
manually. Tahoe-LAFS runs just fine on Tails.


David