I have a question:
MaidSafe is, in theory, going to provide an encrypted, p2p distributed dropbox functionality, correct?
So how is MS going to provide guaranteed 24/7 access to clients data?
Farmers will provide storage space, and recieve SafeCoin as an award, but these guys are mostly not going to be IT pro's who can guarantee 99.9% uptime.
How will MS deal with a farmer that drops out, taking the stored MS data on his/her hard drive with them ?
The only option that I see to come close to guaranteeing 100% uptime of individual clients data will be to stripe/mirror that data over multiple farmers, but even that still doesn't give 100% certainty that all of the data will be online and accessible at any given moment, and will massively increase the amount of storage needed on the MS network.
Anyone have any idea how this will be implemented?
I am not a developer. In fact very far from it. From what I read is that they will always try to maintain at least 4 copies of any file. So if one computer drops out, 3 are left and then the network will instantly try to make a 4th copy somewhere else. So people will always be dropping out, but most of the farmers will be leaving their machines on all the time and so it'll be hard for 4 copies to go down exactly at once. But yes, if they do, a person would have to wait until one of them hopefully turned their farmer back on.