Permanent Web Publishing

Abstract

LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a prototype of a system to preserve access to scientific journals published on the Web. It is a majority-voting fault-tolerant system that, unlike normal systems, has far more replicas than would be required just to survive the anticipated failures. We are exploring techniques that exploit the surplus of replicas to permit a much looser form of coordination between them than conventional fault-tolerant technology would require.