A distributed data store is a network in which a user stores his or her information on a number of peer network nodes. The user also usually reciprocates and allows users to use his or her computer as a storage node as well. Information may or may not be accessible to other users depending on the design of the network.
Most of the peer to peer networks do not have distributed data stores in that the user's data is only available when their node is on the network. However, this distinction is somewhat blurred in a system such as BitTorrent, where it is possible for the originating node to go offline but the content to continue to be served. Still, this is only the case for individual files requested by the redistributors, as contrasted with a network such as Freenet where all computers are made available to serve all files.
Distributed datastore networks
- NNTP ( the distributed data storage protocol used for Usenet news)
- BitTorrent
- the Mnesia Database ( http://www.erlang.org/~hakan/mnesia_overview.pdf , http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MnesiaDatabase )
- GNUnet
- the Secure File System (SFS) http://elbe.borg.umn.edu/ (not to be confused with the Self-certifying File System (SFS) http://fs.net/ )
- Global File System (GFS)
- The Chord Project http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/chord/
- SVK - Distributed Version Control http://www.bieberlabs.com/wordpress/?p=49 , http://svk.elixus.org/
- Groove shared workspace, used for DoHyki.