Privacy and distant storage

Some people seem to think that their data is only safe in their own homes. I agree that not keeping a local copy or storing unprotected personal documents on a machine you don't control are bad things. But I was reminded today (while trolling on Numerama, a French tech-related news site) that having them home doesn't make them safe from:

• hardware failures such as hard drive breakdowns (although smartmontools may be able to alert you before it is too late)
• disasters such as fire

Of course, if your home burns, loosing your files will be the least of your concerns, but if you know they are safe it is one less thing to worry about.

Then I realized that having backups in different geographic places does not necessarily endanger your privacy, it just depends on how you do it. What you need is to encrypt and/or cut the data so that the people who will store it for you will not be able to read or exploit it (just like Freenet does for different reasons).

So the next question is where to store it ? I came to see three possibilities:

• pay for some storage service, might be necessary if you have a lot of data
• share storage space with peers, this was my original thought
• share storage space with family and/or friends, this the safest of the three and credit goes to Kaliko for suggesting it on the utopians chat room

I believe, like many others, that a good place for such sharing software is in residential gateways, maybe we'll see it implemented someday in the Freedom Box ?