partial_accumen

It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.

That pretty well describes 1st generation robo mowers: lawn roombas.

Thankfully they’ve evolved significantly since then and are on 4th generation tech now.

Where, similar to torrent tech and PeerTube, you allocate some storage on your PC to someone’s backups, and can publish your data on the network in return, so that data would be distributed between computers and could be requested on demand?

I appreciate your goal, but this sounds like a privacy nightmare and extremely dangerous legal minefield. Most data worth backing up is important to keep private. If whatever encryption you’re using is discovered to be vulnerable to realistic decryption by a third party, then you’ll have the seeds (no pun intended) planted for your data theft even before knowledge of the vulnerability exists.

The legal angle is even more worrisome. Imagine if the person you gave backup space to on your network decided to store legally objectionable material in your house on your machines. You would be subject the penalties. Big companies get around this legal landmine by having Service Agreements and attestation that you won’t be storing that kind of data.

The cheapest method for off-site secure personal backups would be to get a bank safe deposit box and an external hard drive.

DenverCoder9 strikes again?