Is it possible to back up MacOS or Windows OS itself with IPFS?
If that is possible, please let me know the benefits.
No real benefits as I see. IPFS is a transport protocol, you would still need to actually store your data somewhere. IPFS is not a magical harddrive in the sky.
By putting your data on IPFS you will also make it available to everyone on the internet (you might of course encrypt it first but still probably not a great idea)
Did I skip the patch, where IPFS had authentication built-in?
I yeah, it would (kind of) work, if you can copy Windows in a non-active state to a node. But considering the size of a Windows installation and network speed (IPFS used to be sloooooooow)… Afaik files uploaded to IPFS are not encrypted as well, so whoever in control of that node can read them - and anyone else can download them, too. You would have to setup a private node on a different PC inside your network. And even then you have to copy the files there somehow.
The next thing would be to: How to download that backup from a bootable USB, so it has network and can read IPFS to write to disk AND write any data required to even boot Windows on a blank drive?
The next thing is: Time. How long will it take to backup? How long to restore? If it takes longer then 15 Minutes, it’s basically useless.
It’s a good idea, but alas IPFS would be a poor fit for this as there is no assurance that anyone would cache your giant backup files.
You are better off using Wasabi or some other S3 backup target.
I have backup solution which backups to ipfs.
Benefits are easy to transport backed data to other (offsite) computer and to filecoin or to https://crust.network.
You can use hello.app, it is client-side encrypted with a metamask wallet for individual files no larger than 2GB and it has decentralized zero-knowledge content addressing on top of IPFS protocol, you would have to compress and fraction rar files in 2GB parts.
check Lighthouse broswer app - https://files.lighthouse.storage/
for our desktop/windows early access dm me