What if part of the Internet is not accessible during upload to Tardigrade?

1

Let’s take the following context:

  • I am a Tardigrade client who wants to store his data on the Storj network
  • When uploading data (through the official uplink CLI), there is an outage or a bad network configuration (on my side or elsewhere) that will block communication with part of the world but the communication with my satellite is still OK.

How will Tardigrade satellite behave?

  • Will he make me send the data only to the nodes that are available to me? Even if they are all at the same area (let’s say they are all in France, for example)?

    • If so, it may impact theorically the availability and durability, because there is a much higher probability that these nodes will be off at the same time.
    • When the rest of the network will be reachable from me, will the data be spread over all other available nodes?

  • Will he make me send the data the some nodes that are not available to me, which will result in errors?

  • Will he just send an error and stop the upload process?

Thank you for your explanation!

2

Node selection for upload is mostly random and independent of whether the customer can access the node. If the satellite sees a node is online, it will be used in node selection (as long as it’s in good standing). So it depends on what number of nodes that are selected will be unavailable to the customer. If enough nodes are available to remain above the repair threshold, the upload will succeed, if not, the upload will fail.

There is an additional risk to keep in mind though. Repairs of data are done by the satellite, so it can repair data to even more nodes that the customer isn’t able to reach. This could lead to more files being unavailable until the connection issue is resolved.

What is the context of your question? Are you worried about temporary unavailability or actual file loss? The latter won’t be effected at all, your files will still be stored securely on enough nodes. Upload errors and retrievability are the only possible issue and as long as the initial problem is temporary, those will be temporary as well.

3

Thanks, it’s clear :slight_smile:

I was just thinking about Tardigrade in a specific context where a country would be partially isolated. If some nodes are in this country, I was wondering if the data would be sent to those nodes or if the upload would failed because all nodes are on the same area (i.e. same country).
But I don’t have a detailed scenario in mind. It is pure speculation

4

I do believe that restricting data to certain geographical areas is a feature that is considered for the future. But until that exists, if you think it’s likely that large parts of the world will become inaccessible to you for whatever reason, Tardigrade may not work for you.

With some additional coding though the platform could even be adjusted to ensure availability on all continents even if they are closed off. There is a lot of potential to use the service to protect against that, but it’s not yet built in.

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