I’ve been around these parts for a while. I’ve had a many hardware failures resulting in data loss and witnessed it happen to others time and time again. I have come to terms that if you own a hard drive, some where in the future, sooner or later, it will die. If your data disappears with it or not is all dependent on having a backup somewhere.
At the same time I feel I have many friends who haven’t gone through these experiences to learn this hard lessons yet. Technology is cheap, and thusly the creation of valuable content has become easier and easier. Everyone has personal photos and videos that they adore and would break into tears if any of those memories disappeared.
This is where the project comes in. I want to create a simple system of storage for my friends in the bay area to come by and use as an off site backup. This would be space for personal data and not a full system image. The plan would be to run some sort of RAID so the backups would have a hard time failing. After a month since someone’s last backup, I’d send them an email demanding they’d come back and do another, the next day I’d call.
As much as backup solutions within current operating systems are getting better and better. I feel it isn’t enough. You don’t have mom or dad nagging at you to do your backup, nor does it ever tend to be offsite (which is more important then you think). Having something that’ll always be there for you, only a month stale at the most is rather worth while.
It would personally bring me joy to know that many of my friends wouldn’t be going through much of the same heart break I’ve gone through in the past when a drive has died and my data has become lost. Sadly I’ve got two road blocks. First is cost, this isn’t something I’m willing to build from cash out of my own pocket, nor is it something I want to pay the power bill for. The other issue is my current residence could not accommodate such a thing when considering noise and power consumption (I have a hard time as it is running my little Shuttle machine).
Anyone else have any thoughts or comments on this subject?
6 Comments
I don’t see a need to build an app when there are solutions out there. The cost is low and could be lower still when we pool resources.
Mac users may like the .mac services. Whatever.
http://rsync.net/ is great. High marks for dirt cheap + crazy reliable + hacker friendly. I can confirm that engineers answer questions personally.
They are a little more biz-oriented but I’m sure you can figure something out. $1/GB/month gets a bit pricey if you want to back up a movie collection, but it’s more than most people need for important personal files. Figure out a way to share an account — magic “important!!” folder on the hard drive that rsyncs to a particular directory. Could pool the cost among 30 people and it wouldn’t cost more than a couple of pizzas.
Of course rsync doesn’t protect against intentional deletion that you regret months later, but your post was about hardware failure.
Yeah, I’m currently looking into automated, easy, offsite backups, but with versioned files. Kind of like the Time Machine approach, but platform agnostic. Looks like Carbonite is good for this, but not Mac friendly (yet). :(
And just throwing this out there without proper research, but what about using something like S3?
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html
S3 is way cheaper for storage, it’s $0.15/GB/Month. However then you have to set up everything yourself and unlike rsync.net there are bandwidth charges.
However, now that I reread Rubin’s post, I think I missed the point. Rubin, do you want a social service, in the old fashioned sense of social, where you physically have to drop by someone’s place to do the backup? There’s something appealing about that… although inconvenient to bring media and portables around, is the social pressure is the whole point?
This is a really great idea. I’m not in the habit of backing anything up except for burning digital photos on DVD. I am definitely willing to help set things up once I get back from Austria.
It would be trivial to buy a system with a RAID5 array, colo the box and allow backups over ssh with rsync + gpg.
We’d just need to find the right people.
my suggestion is to have a serious look at venti. it’s an archival block store that is a big step above time machine (i was disappointed with apple when i found out the tech solution they used for time machine: LINKS!? are you fucking kidding me!?).
venti:
works at the block level, not the file level
automatically compresses data before archiving
won’t archive a block that is already in the archive and unchanged
provides a way to see the filesystem at any previous date
it was originally developed for Plan 9 at bell labs, but it’s been released into the wild and runs on linux, osx, bsd, etc. the guys that developed it are at google research now, iirc.