Can you elaborate, please? My initial reaction was the same as grandparent post - maybe IPFS doesn't have all the security things stated up front, but these things seem similar.
* infinit provides a virtual filesystem that you can use with any other application. At the moment IPFS only has helpers and an api
* infinit's goal is to use the existing infrastructure (your disk, your S3 account, your google drive account, ...) to form a big drive. IPFS lives in its own world, which is great when everybody uses IPFS, but we're not there (yet ?)
"ipfs mount" is certainly a command, and it mounts the ipfs filesystem over /ipfs and /ipns . And I've already used those in conjunction with programs. The ipfs mount directive has been there since 0.3.1
I don't view smearing your data across multiple fragile services to be a "feature". Worse yet, if any of those companies believe you're breaking ToS, you're out of luck.
Whereas ipfs does live in its own world, it integrates well with our workflows. And http://ipfs.io runs a public ipfs gateway, so that anyone can resolve data from the network without running the peer software.
Infinit's goal is not to compete against IPFS which is focusing on providing a protocol for distributing content.
IPFS does not focus on providing redundancy, fault tolerance, rebalancing or file-level functionalities such as access control, versioning etc. This is what Infinit is doing.
Two very different solutions even though they may share some technical similarities.
redundancy - Any node in the IPFS network can provide the requested data. That's because the identity of the data is with the name, and not the server you got the data from.
fault tolerance - Absolutely does provide fault tolerance. The filesystem is a SHA256 hash in what they call a multihash. Because everything has a hash-name, the file system is a self-certifying filesystem.
Rebalancing - Doesn't make sense. You need more capacity or bandwidth? Add more machines, and pin the data you need.
Access control - file-level encryption is part of the protocol, but not implemented yet. The idea is that GPG can serve as the go-between until ipfs encryption subroutines are implemented.
Versioning - similar, in the spec but not added yet. There will be 2 types of versioning; blockchain and git-style
I'm reading what I can find :) Sorry if I missed information, it was not my intention to say that IPFS was not good, just to say that the purpose was different from Infinit's.
Redundancy: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/issues/50. One of IPFS' core developers clearly states that there is no redundancy in IPFS. I took my information from there because it was the only one I could find with Google. It is not because one node can retrieve the data that the data is actually stored multiple times and that the storage servers coordinate to maintain consistency. From what I understand, IPFS content-hashes information (as Infinit does) but does not replicate it. As such, if a server goes down, its hosted content becomes unavailable; very much like the Web. This is not the case of Infinit (if you defined a replication factor above 1). Again, different purposes, my goal is not to say one is better; redundancy obviously has a cost.
Fault tolerance: Yes nodes can go down in IPFS but the system will not function as before as some data may be unavailable, in the worst-case scenario, permanently, should the failure be fatal. Sorry, I should have made myself clear. IPFS is fault-tolerant but does not ensure availability. Bittorrent as well. Some files may become so rare that you cannot access it anymore. Infinit ensures that all the files are available at any time. Self-certifying is another concept altogether.
Rebalancing: I don't understand exactly what you mean but if you want to provide a POSIX-compliant reliable (available/durable) file system, you need fault tolerance and rebalancing, which is to recreate missing replicas and possibly move data around as servers are added or fail. If you can't do that, then again you have the problem of potentially having unavailable pieces of information. It is fine for some systems such as the Web (not critical if you can't access some rare pages), but it is super critical for an enterprise file system in production. Again, different purposes I believe as IPFS (from what I understand, sorry if I missed something) is trying to provide a HTTP replacement: a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol (from http://ipfs.io).
Access control: File-level encryption is one thing but access control something else entirely: how to allow other users to read/write files and how to manage the keys. What about removing files? What about groups? Subgroups? And what about integrating into an enterprise directory (LDAP)? These compose a complete set of access control capabilities from my point of view. File-level encryption is obviously the basis for access control but is not enough. As you stated, it is planned in the protocol.
Versioning: Good to know that IPFS will be providing versioning, I didn't know that. Thanks for pointing that out.
To conclude, both projects seem to rely on some similar tech such as content hashing. IPFS seems to be going the way of a protocol for accessing data in a decentralized way (like the Web in a more modern way) but without providing redundancy, consistency and availabilities garantees. Storj is going this way for instance, providing a peer-to-peer object store (S3-like). Infinit however seems to be more focused on providing a POSIX-compliant peer-to-peer, reliable, secure and fault-tolerant file system for Ops and DevOps.
Thanks for the in-depth analysis, it's super helpful.
My understanding is that IPFS is bittorrent + blockchain mashed together (I've read the tech specs, it's more complicated but will have to suffice as a explanation device here). The bittorrent part certainly has redundancy when the data is widely accessed, it's just not guaranteed to be.
From a high level, it seems that Infinit has just more stated features at the moment, but it does look like the two technologies are in the same space and can solve similar problems of file storage in a large, distributed manner.
