A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.