Frequently asked questions¶

Roughly: anything 64-bit that still powers on and has a working disk of 100 GB or more. In practice that's most laptops made since about 2010. Cracked screens, dead batteries, and missing keys are all fine — a node doesn't need any of those things to serve storage. See Donate a laptop for the full criteria.

The entire disk is securely erased before anything else happens to the machine — every donated laptop is wiped before it's health-checked, imaged, or connected to anything. If you'd like to wipe it yourself first, even better; we'll wipe it again anyway.

We'll take it off your hands and pass it to a certified e-waste recycler, and we may harvest working parts (RAM, disks) to upgrade other nodes. It won't go to landfill either way.

No. There are two ways to contribute: donate a machine (we house it) or host a node (it lives at your place, plugged into your power and internet). Hosting is what makes the network truly distributed, but it's entirely optional. See the Brisbane pilot page for what hosting involves.

During the pilot, allocations are set per-contributor based on what the cluster can sustain — as a rule of thumb, expect an allocation in proportion to the usable capacity you contributed. The exact policy will be settled (publicly) as the pilot runs. Remember every byte you store is stored three times across the cluster, so the cluster's usable capacity is roughly a third of its raw capacity.

It's honest-speed. Nodes live on home internet connections, and Australian upload bandwidth is what it is. Junk Net is great for backups, archives, photo libraries, and file sharing — things where durability matters more than latency. It is not a CDN and it won't stream 4K video to a crowd.

Every object is stored as three copies on three different machines in different homes, so single failures — a dead disk, a power cut, an unplugged node — don't cause loss. But Junk Net is a community project in development, not a commercial service with an SLA. Treat it as one copy in your backup strategy, not the only copy. See Trust & safety.

Not meaningfully. Objects are split into chunks that are scattered across many machines, so any single node holds an incomplete jumble of compressed fragments. That said, Garage does not encrypt data at rest by default, so for anything sensitive we recommend (and document) client-side encryption — then nobody but you can read your data, ever. Details in Trust & safety.

Anything that speaks S3: rclone, the AWS CLI, s3cmd, Cyberduck, restic, Duplicati, and every major language's S3 SDK. See Using your storage for quickstarts.

It's a community project by Aquainnis, starting in Brisbane, Australia. During the pilot, cluster administration (the mesh certificate authority and the Garage admin credentials) is held by the project maintainer. Long-term, the goal is community governance — that transition is on the roadmap.

Nothing. The entry fee is a laptop you weren't using. Hosts pay for the small amount of power their node draws (roughly AU$30–80/year for a typical old laptop) — that's the only ongoing cost anywhere in the system, and it's borne voluntarily.

Access is per-community and per-person — keys are issued to known contributors, not anonymous signups, and the trust & safety page sets out the acceptable-use expectations and what happens when they're broken. Chunking means no host ever holds a stranger's complete files, and client-side encryption means hosts can't be expected to police content they cannot see — the accountability sits with the person who holds the keys.

Cousins, not siblings. Junk Net isn't a global anonymous network and there's no token. It's a local cluster run by people who know each other, using boring, proven tools (Garage, Nebula, systemd). Community-scale trust is the feature.

MinIO and Ceph assume data-centre conditions: uniform hardware, fast low-latency links, disks that mostly don't disappear. Garage was designed by Deuxfleurs for the opposite: mismatched consumer machines in people's homes on ordinary internet connections. That's Junk Net's exact situation. More in The storage layer.

Yes, any time. Download your data (no egress fees, obviously), and if you're hosting a node we'll drain it — Garage rebalances its chunks onto other machines — and you can keep, return, or recycle the hardware. No lock-in is the point.