Background

Peat - Social Areology Peat is Urbit's first backup utility. Outside of the Flag Day script and other areologic phenomena, the breach has been an impenetrable data barrier for hosts of Urbit content. Worse still, the breacher's compatriots retain access to distal copies of a host's data while the source is destroyed. Additionally, Agent state has been, to date, considered ephemeral trans-breach.

Rationale

Urbit will eventually be a perfect diamond protocol at the center of a computing dynasty. Until that time, however, people will experience issues with their urbits. Sometimes, people will breach. Unfortunately, data continuity across breach has remained technically possible but practically impossible for users, to date. Urbit has been blessed with the growth of dozens of High Quality Communities each generating their own High Quality Content. Unfortunately, prior to our efforts with Peat, when the host of a High Quality Community went down, the content was lost to the ether. With Peat, this changes. Peat has already been used to recreate extremely large, high quality groups including a chat in the Uqbar group↗, and the entirety of Networked Subject (formerly hosted on ~matwet)↗.

As a note, networked subject_ had been active and un-breached since OS1 released and included over 13,000 individual nodes in just one of its 5 graphs.

Peat in a Nutshell

• Import
  • Recover a Social graph from a saved file - transferrable between ships
• Export
  • Export a Social graph to a file on underlying file system (e.g. Unix)
• Backup/Restore
  • Local recreation of a graph that exists, 're-basing' the graph to be hosted by the local ship

Import from Disk - Details

• User has a /path/to/pier/<project-desk>/hav directory for importing (though they could import from anywhere, really).
• User also has a form interface, through Peat's webapp allowing them to import without tracking the files in their loom.

From Clay

• User gets instructions from the frontend as to how to add files to this directory and commit the desk so the files are available in the OS
  • NOTE: This should be converted to using drum's get functionality at some point, but this hasn't been wired up yet in drum.
• User can see all files available for restoration in the default hav directory, delineated by whether they represent Agent state or graphs
• User can select a file for restoration
• User can apply the file for restoration
  • Potentially needing to specify additional details, for a graph (e.g. what group to associate it with, and what to call the new resource) User is informed that the restoration is underway/has completed

From Web

• User gets instructions from the frontend as to how to upload files through the frontend, resulting in their unpacking and importing to graph store
• User can select from local files on the computer through which they're accessing the frontend.
• Note: This method avoids polluting loom with transient files - it is to be the preferred method

Schedule/Compensation

Milestone 1

• Peat is available on a distribution moon for use against graph-store
• Peat users can backup and restore graphs from disk, or duplicate extant graphs where they have access to the graph in their current graph-store instance. Compensation: 3 Stars

Milestone 2

• Peat is updated to work against new groups/socials method post assembly, post release of developer version (though we will try sooner)
• Peat includes a conversion utility for importing graph-store graphs into new groups/socials. Compensation: 1 Star