Martin Pool's blog

parchive - a parity archive tool

PArchive does Reed-Soloman(?) style encoding of arbitrary files. A single input file is split into a number of output files. If only some of the outputs can be restored the original file can still be recovered.

This might have interesting applications in, for example, a distributed backup system, where some of your disks might die during the life of the backup. Or even for regular backups to CDs or DVDs, where a certain fraction of them may die over time.

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