Torrents kind of are that.

No. Why do you think it is?

"Cloud" infers centralized consolidation of resources in a datacenter. A PaaS, for example.

"Decentralized" infers any number of running instances of something that are not tied to any specific vendor, infrastructure, or location.

Cloud can be distributed, but not decentralized since the underlying controls of the infrastructure are themselves centralized.

"Cloud" simply means it's on other people's machines.

personal backups over torrent? and who would download that?

That is not what that term generally means. Somebody COULD be running their own cloud platform, but if you're speaking to a large group of people and you say "Cloud deployed", they understand that to be deployed to a Cloud Provider on a secured platform and location (AWS, Google, Azure...etc).

We don't say "cloud" in engineering anywhere without meaning this. We may refer to a non-colocated deployment of something as "edge" or "off-site", but never "cloud". There isn't a single engineer on this planet who would ever confuse "deployed to cloud" to mean somebody's basement.

You could check out IPFS, the OG.

Filecoin showed promise as a nearly free option. I used to be a storage provider. Met a lot of other storage providers at conventions. The people involved were pretty alright. I haven't interacted with the community in a few years though. Biggest problem I saw back then was a lack of a user friendly means of storing and retrieval. That might have changed now.

Whatever option you pick please make sure you encrypt your data before you send it off.

They're saying that torrents are a form of decentralized cloud storage, not that torrents would be a viable means of decentralizing your own personal backups.

Wouldn't be a good solution, you're hoping that other users are going to volunteer to pin (aka store and seed) your personal backup data for you.

Using IPFS for personal backups is exactly the same as creating a torrent with your backup data - With both it would be unlikely that your personal backup data will actually exist anywhere beyond your own data storage, no one's going to freely volunteer to store your backups for you.

If you set up something like Garage with borg with a bunch of other people you could create a network where you essentially swap hard drive space to ensure you’re all backed up.

But I think Garage assumes very high trust with your fellow hosts, so this doesn’t scale beyond direct social connections.

I used storj.io for a while. Moved to Hetzner Storage boxes for my backup, because that's easier to configure with my restic setup.

Sure, but you don't necessarily have to use it like that, you can provide your own decentralized storage using it. Put some cheap devices (old RPis w/ large SD cards) at friends'/family members' houses and have them pin your most important stuff. If they get broken/lost, NBD, you probably have another copy somewhere else.

If a lot of your data isn't critical and you're willing to gamble a bit (e.g. movies or something you can re-rip), then IPFS could be a perfect fit, just like torrents are (though IPFS probably isn't great for large media like movies, but hopefully my point makes sense).

I'm not saying it's perfect or anything, just that it exists and is in this domain. A lot of similar projects compare themselves to IPFS, so understanding what it is and isn't is useful what evaluating alternatives.

Isn’t that basically SyncThing? I thought it was BitTorrent under the hood.

Pretty much this. Unless those personal back ups happen to also be media people want or osmething

"personal" and "trustless" seem sort of at odds here. you want personal data, so you want personal storage.

what I recommend, if you have the time and energy, is to find another self-hoster you trust and be "backup buddies" with them. set up remote file storage on both your networks and send your backups to the other person's server.

if you can't find another self-hoster, then find a friend or family member you trust and mail them your backups on a physical disk.

Could you seed other peoples syncthings

Similar but no, Syncthing does not use bittorrent or the bittorrent protocol.

Though if you're curious Resilo Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) is similar to Syncthing and does use bittorrent.

Eh, sure OP could do that. Does seem a bit over the top for OP to pursue the most complicated backup solution possible Maybe as a strange experiment to see how it goes, not as a trusted backup solution. (like you said not for critical data)

IPFS would also require more bandwidth vs just about any other solution since it has to constantly talk to other IPFS nodes. And more finicky, last I used IPFS the client would run into memory leaks and other weirdness requiring restarts every now and then (hopefully it's more stable for long-term runs nowadays).

Well, they said they wanted decentralized, and decentralization comes w/ caveats. I'm just providing options.