CiteSeerX — Venti: A New Approach to Archival Storage: "This paper describes a network storage system, called Venti, intended for archival data. In this system, a unique hash of a block's contents acts as the block identifier for read and write operations. This approach enforces a write-once policy, preventing accidental or malicious destruction of data. In addition, duplicate copies of a block can be coalesced, reducing the consumption of storage and simplifying the implementation of clients. Venti is a building block for constructing a variety of storage applications such as logical backup, physical backup, and snapshot file systems."
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