Products

Our first product is Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3.

What is Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3?

Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3 is a reliable and scalable cloud storage back-end for use with the Tahoe-LAFS client software.

What is Tahoe-LAFS?

Tahoe-LAFS is a Free Software, Open Source cloud storage system. It encrypts and cryptographically integrity-checks your files for provider-independent security. That means that the confidentiality and integrity of your files cannot be violated by anyone—not even employees of the storage service provider. For more information see Tahoe-LAFS.org.

The Tahoe-LAFS project comes with complete source code, including client and server. If you use the Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3 service then you need to run only the Tahoe-LAFS client software—we provide the cloud. However, the Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3 service is completely open and transparent so that you always have the option to migrate your data to another service provider or to your own private Tahoe-LAFS cloud.

What is it good for?

It is good for securely backing up your data off-site. The "tahoe backup" command inspects your local filesystem for files that have changed since the last time you ran it. It uploads each file that has changed and it creates a directory in Tahoe-LAFS to hold the current "snapshot"—the current version of each of the files. You can browse or access old versions just by browsing the old snapshot directories.

Where is the data stored?

Your data, encrypted, is stored on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), which is a convenient, reliable, and widely understood platform for storage.

Data is replicated according to the following policy decribed in Amazon's Overview of Security Processes:

Data stored in Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, or Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is redundantly stored in multiple physical locations as part of normal operation of those services and at no additional charge. Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB provide object durability by storing objects multiple times across multiple Availability Zones on the initial write and then actively doing further replication in the event of device unavailability or detected bit-rot.

How much does Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3 cost?

$1.00/GB/month

Discounts are available for full-time students, educational institutions, libraries, non-profits, and open source projects.

What is the relationship between Least Authority Enterprises and the Tahoe-LAFS open source project?

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, founder and CEO of Least Authority Enterprises, was one of the inventors of Tahoe-LAFS. Least Authority Enterprises contributes all of the code we write to the free/open source project. We believe that's the best thing for our customers.

Are there limits on how much data I can store?

There are no practical limits on the total data, but there is currently a limit on the size of an individual file. Files larger than about 100 MB might fail to upload. All upload failures, including failures caused by this, are shown in your Tahoe-LAFS client software, so you'll know if this happens to you.

We are working on lifting this limitation and will keep you informed about our progress.

Can I delete old files to save space?

For now, it is not possible to remove data from the LAE service. If you unlink a file, you lose your ability to access it, but it does not free up the space in your S3 bucket, so you still get charged for it.

We are working on fixing this issue and will keep you informed about our progress.

How do I start?

Please read and follow the information on our Sign Up Page.