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Expecting and preparing for failure

Hivenet is built on unreliable devices—by design.

Thanasis Karavasilis avatar
Written by Thanasis Karavasilis
Updated over a week ago

Unlike traditional cloud providers that rely on massive, always-on data centers, Hivenet’s storage network is made up of everyday devices contributed by people around the world.

That means we expect disruptions:

  • Devices go offline

  • People pause their contributions

  • Laptops go to sleep

  • Power cuts happen

And that’s okay—because we plan for it.

Hivenet’s system is designed to detect missing or unavailable shards and rebuild them automatically using erasure coding (which we just covered). But we also do more behind the scenes to maintain data reliability.

Here’s how:

  • Repair algorithms constantly check shard availability and regenerate missing pieces

  • Garbage collection removes unnecessary duplicates, keeping the network efficient

  • We aim for a 200% replication factor on average, meaning twice as many shards exist as needed—just in case

In other words, the system is always working in the background to ensure your data is there when you need it, even if part of the network disappears for a while.

Up next: your passphrase—and why it’s the most important part of your Hivenet account.


Previous:
⬅️ Introducing erasure codes

Next:
➡️ Your passphrase and you

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