P2P Network, or Peer to Peer Network, has attracted a lot of attention over the last few years because of the copyright lawsuits being fought with Napster. Actually a similar network of Usenet has been in existence for a long time without attracting the similar attention. Wide spread use of desktop computers had already brought about the concepts of LANs and WANs. What is so different about P2P Networks?

A group of desktops connected on a local area network in an organization is a network comprising of a server with all the resources such as the application software and large data storage with clients accessing the resources as required. The processing of the information is done by the clients and often the results are stored on the server. This is a typical structure of one-peer-and-many-clients.

There would also be structures in which a number of desktops, each complete in itself with operating system, application software, storage capacity, etc., are interconnected through a hub and thus able to interact with each other as and when needed. Each desktop in this example can work independently of others, interacting, through Internet, with entities external to this limited network. This would be a limited Peer-to-Peer network.

In a large Peer to Peer Network, computing power resides at the edges of the network rather than the network itself. Business information as well as audio, video and other information in digital format is shared. P2P network can also mean grid computing, in which many Peers operate in a coordinated manner on a common problem. Commercially operated P2P networks such as Allmydata provide online data backup or data storage. Thus, you can have great data backup in case of emergencies.

There are many free P2P networks such as Napster, LimeWire, BitTorrent, eDonkey2000 and Morpheus. All of them allow search of public folders for MP3s, documents, software or videos. All these and other P2P Networks need to store data in a secure manner, index it, locate it when required and send it to the Peer requesting it. Computers participating in such a network play a variety of roles; servers store data back up; routers route messages; caches simply cache data, clients access servers through routers either to store data or retrieve data.

P2P backup storage systems must be fast, and reliable. Continuous data protection is ensured by storage at various nodes and providing online backup. They use various techniques of centralized and decentralized storage of data, data keys and indexes for purpose of security. In case of fault at nodes or in case of data disasters, file recovery based on statistical techniques is used; this ensures to recover deleted files. P2P Networks are going through a continual improvement in the system of data storage, data protection and encryption to prevent identity “sniffing”. However, it would be difficult to name the best P2P.