I was speaking of this in the NRW forum but figured I'd just put it here as a "documented idea" for the record. It is complicated but is used today. For the researchers with extremely tight budgets and might not be able to afford storage space right away for some of their completed work (ie, NRW)..that work could be archived until needed or space is freed up by using the free space on volunteers' hard drives.

A user could donate whatever amount of hard disk space they would like and it would be distributed and replicated over many many computers. So if one crashes or is offline when the data is needed, other computers would have that same data for redundancy.

I can't remember the service's name but there is a website you can go to now to do this. You can either buy space and upload your files which would then be downloaded to other members' computers until needed. Or you can donate say 50GB worth of your drive space and be able to use 50GB worth of drive space on the members' computers. The latter would mainly just be for redundancy of data.

Just a thought as WCG expands. Might be an awesome thing to offer the researchers. Granted, it would take a large amount of development manhours...but might be worth exploring at some point in the future. If even just a fraction of the WCG members donated space...you're looking at many many terabytes worth of available storage space.