There’s folks who don’t backup their computers for whatever reason… this is sad.
It’s occured to me that making initial backups of freshly installed systems might be expensive and ROI is not there.
It might take a long time and what most folks would be copying are often these well various well known blobs - that are at least theoretically easy to recover - through a reinstall. Comparatively, the few really important/ unique parts of configuration that might be unique or valuable or … few small bits of data that is really really important… that usually takes up comparatively very little space on a new system.
I’m thinking of things like executables that are part of an ship in Windows… or game executables and associated assets - folks waited a ton of time to get them onto the system, now they need to copy them off the system… it’s madness.
So… I was thinking… if some of these were “publicly OK to archive”, then one could snapshot their system at some point in time, and in the process of making a backup archive, they could replace these well known files with pointers to e.g. ipfs paths or similar.
It would have to be done ahead of time/ahead of first backup.
This makes a lot of sense if you yourself have a small network/multiple machines and can guarantee availability of this duplicate data… but if you’re sitting at home with a laptop per person and one or two gaming PCs… The overhead is too high.
Is there a public archive of well known blobs that someone maintains? …
… in ipfs maybe?