disclaimer: this is a very early development version with no peer review
a clandestine distributed backup system for Tails
project objective
This project's objective is to help people in oppressive surveillance states ensure the confidentiality and integrity of their data. A Tahoe-LAFS backup system can have interesting political implications such as powerful operational security tactics to ensure confidentiality of data while traveling internationally in the most hostile environments where one could be subject to search and seizure. Tools that enable these highly effective operational security tactics need to made easier to use so that everyone can use them.
The two highest priorities of this project are that of usuability and security. Tahoe-LAFS is not widely used by novice computer users because of the useability issues. Tails (The amnesiac incognito live system) is now a well known Linux "live" distribution with a reputation for making powerful cryptographic/security/anonymity software easy to use. A Tails integrated backup system using Tahoe-LAFS must be easy to use in order for it to receive widspread adoption and to be consistent with the desires of the Tails development roadmap.
This is a prototype backup system designed for Tails... but it will work just fine for non-Tails systems. It can be used to backup and restore your Tails Persistent volume to a Tahoe-LAFS onion grid. There are several ways to integrate Tahoe-LAFS and Tails; this. is. just. one. way. to. do. it.
Use this Ansible role with Tahoe-lafs - Least Authoratative Filesystem https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs
This ansible role can help you reduce the complexity to a single command for deploying one or more Tahoe-LAFS storage servers, introducers and clients.
Disclaimer
There are probably bugs. This Ansible role is designed to be used with Tor and Tahoe-LAFS. It is possible it could also be used to configure Tahoe-LAFS grids without Tor... however this isn't how I use Tahoe-LAFS, so I only tested it with Tor (torsocks + Tor Hidden Services).
The Tahoe Least Authority File System (Tahoe-LAFS) has been actively developed since 2007. Just as Tor concentrates on anonymity, Tahoe-LAFS's developers have worked hard to create a resilient, decentralized, infrastructure that lets you store online both data you'd want to keep private, as well as data you want to share with selected groups of friends. It's also able to protect against a single source of failure or censorship, like a commercial service being attacked or responding to a takedown.
Tahoe-LAFS is a Free and Open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, preserving your privacy and security.