info_tfgrid/collections/tech/qsss/qss_filesystem.md

# Quantum Safe Filesystem

![](img/qsss_intro.png)  

A redundant filesystem, can store PB's (millions of gigabytes) of information.

Unique features:

- Unlimited scalability (many petabytes)
- Quantum Safe:
  - On the TFGrid no farmer knows what the data is
  - Even a quantum computer cannot decrypt the data
- Data can't be lost
  - Protection for datarot, data will autorepair
- Data is kept forever (data does not get deleted)
- Data is dispersed over multiple sites
  - Even if the sites go down the data will not be lost
- Up to 10x more efficient than storing on classic storage cloud systems
- Can be mounted as filesystem on any OS or any deployment system (OSX, Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes, TFGrid etc.)
- Compatible with ± all data workloads (not high performance data driven workloads like a database)
- Self-healing: when a node or disk is lost, the storage system can get back to the original redundancy level
- Helps with compliance for regulations like GDPR (as the hosting facility has no view on what is stored: information is encrypted and incomplete)
- Hybrid: can be installed onsite, public and private
- Read-write caching on encoding node (the front end)

![](img/planet_fs.jpg)

## Mount Any Files In Your Storage Infrastructure

The QSFS is a mechanism to mount any file system (in any format) on the grid, in a quantum secure way. 

This storage layer relies on 3 primitives of the ThreeFold technology : 

- [0-db](https://github.com/threefoldtech/0-db) is the storage engine.
It is an always append database, which stores objects in an immutable format. It allows history to be kept out-of-the-box, good performance on disk, low overhead, easy data structure and easy backup (linear copy and immutable files).

- [0-stor-v2](https://github.com/threefoldtech/0-stor_v2) is used to disperse the data into chunks by performing 'forward-looking error-correcting code' (FLECC) on it and send the fragments to safe locations.
It takes files in any format as input, encrypts the file with AES based on a user-defined key, then FLECC-encodes the file and spreads out the result
to multiple 0-DBs. The number of generated chunks is configurable to make it more or less robust against data loss through unavailable fragments. Even if some 0-DBs are unreachable, you can still retrieve the original data, and missing 0-DBs can even be rebuilt to have full consistency. It is an essential element of the operational backup. 

- [0-db-fs](https://github.com/threefoldtech/0-db-fs) is the filesystem driver which uses 0-DB as a primary storage engine. It manages the storage of directories and metadata in a dedicated namespace and file payloads in another dedicated namespace.

Together they form a storage layer that is quantum secure: even the most powerful computer can't hack the system because no single node contains all of the information needed to reconstruct the data.

![](img/quantum_safe_storage.jpg)

This concept scales forever, and you can bring any file system on top of it: 
- S3 storage 
- any backup system
- an ftp-server
- IPFS and Hypercore distributed file sharing protocols 

![](img/quantum_safe_storage_scale.jpg)



## Architecture

By using our filesystem inside a Virtual Machine or Kubernetes, the TFGrid user can deploy any storage application on top e.g. Minio for S3 storage, OwnCloud as online fileserver.

![](img/qsstorage_architecture.jpg)

Any storage workload can be deployed on top of the zstor.

```mermaid
graph TD
subgraph Data Ingress and Egress
qss[Quantum Safe Storage Engine]
end
subgraph Physical Data storage
st1[Virtual Storage Device 1]
st2[Virtual Storage Device 2]
st3[Virtual Storage Device 3]
st4[Virtual Storage Device 4]
st5[Virtual Storage Device 5]
st6[...]
qss -.-> st1 & st2 & st3 & st4 & st5 & st6
end
```