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IDAs have different security properties to erasure coding 

[Imported from Trac: page FAQ, version 96]
daira 2013-07-27 02:10:23 +00:00
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FAQ.md

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**<a name="Q0_what_is_it">Q0:</a> What is Tahoe-LAFS? What can you do with it?**
A: Think of Tahoe-LAFS as being like [BitTorrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent), except you can upload as well as download. Also, Tahoe-LAFS has directories and files so that if you're looking at a directory that is stored in Tahoe-LAFS, you can navigate to a file or sub-directory that is also in Tahoe-LAFS. So in that sense it is a little more like a filesystem than BitTorrent is. Tahoe-LAFS comes with filesystem integration for Unix (FUSE) and for Windows—see [#Q23_FUSE Q23], below.
A: Think of Tahoe-LAFS as being like [BitTorrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent), except you can upload as well as download. Also, Tahoe-LAFS has directories and files so that if you're looking at a directory that is stored in Tahoe-LAFS, you can navigate to a file or sub-directory that is also in Tahoe-LAFS. So in that sense it is a little more like a filesystem than BitTorrent is. Tahoe-LAFS also allows filesystem integration for Unix via sshfs.
**<a name="Q1_why_tahoe_lafs">Q1:</a> What is special about Tahoe-LAFS? Why should anyone care about it instead of [other distributed storage systems](RelatedProjects#OtherProjects)?**
@ -18,9 +18,9 @@ A: You know how with RAID-5 you can lose any one drive and still recover? And t
This uses an amount of space on each server equal to the total size of your data divided by `K`.
The default Tahoe-LAFS parameters are `3-of-10`, so the data is spread over 10 different drives, and you can lose any 7 of them and still recover the entire data. This gives much better reliability than comparable RAID setups, at a cost of only 3.3 times the storage space that a single copy takes. It takes about 3.3 times the storage space, because it uses space on each server needs equal to 1/3 of the size of the data and there are 10 servers.
The default Tahoe-LAFS parameters are `3-of-10`, so the data is spread over 10 different drives, and you can lose any 7 of them and still recover the entire data. This gives much better reliability than comparable RAID setups, at a cost of only 3.3 times the storage space that a single copy takes. It takes about 3.3 times the storage space, because it uses space on each server equal to 1/3 of the size of the data, and there are 10 servers.
Erasure coding is also known as "forward error correction" and as an "information dispersal algorithm".
Erasure coding is also known as "forward error correction".
**<a name="Q3_disable_encryption">Q3:</a> Is there a way to disable the encryption for content which isn't secret? Won't that save a lot of CPU cycles?**