Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house.
I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.
I want someone at HN to build a small network device which I can plug a NAS or USB drive into. Buy a pair, install one at your buddies/mothers house. They find each other over magically over the internet and any data you put on the local drive gets encrypted and put on the other remote drive.
Other drive burns down / is stolen, no problem. Your house burns down, go and pick up your photos, enter your passphrase.
I'll pay 200€ or so. The hard part is convincing another million people they want one, I guess.
It's not hardware, but the CrashPlan backup software (supporting Linux, too) has a nice way to "backup to a friend". You just have to "friend" each other on the backup (!) social network and you can select your friend's computer as backup destination and vice versa. While not default, there's an option to not store the encryption key with your account (otherwise there's some escrow going on in case you lose your PC).
> If you want to be safe against hard drives and Lima failures, we recommend you to install an extra Lima on your local network or on another location which will replicate your data.
No, it's not what I want. Best answer yet though :)
"Once Lima is installed on each of your devices, the memory of each device is replaced by one unique digital memory that contains all of your data."
Nope. I want a hard drive that is mirrored in a different physical location on hardware that I own. I want control over the content. I don't want to store data on other people's servers. I don't want another monthly bill. I don't want an agreement with another party in another country.
Agreed, if you want a HD mirroring that's not something Lima does (at least at the moment) but for data and photos Lima is pretty much exactly what you asked for: You don't have to store data on other people's servers. Buy two limas and two usb drives, install one set in your house and another in your buddies/mothers house.
From the kickstarter page[1]:
> You can install one Lima in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Limas will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Limas are enough. But with each Lima you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Lima, you can also ask your Limas to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted[2], so your friends will not be able to read it.
The other company in this space to watch is http://www.tonido.com/ but I don't think their offering is as close a lima to what you want.
The software can be provided with Bittorrent Sync: launch, enter some code and you're in a shared space with whoever has the code. I'm currently writing an opensource equivalent.
The difficult part will be to come up with a packaged hardware that is simple to install, though, but you can start with friends' computers.
Seriously? That's a pretty straight forward project. Buy a USB drive, buy a Rasberry Pi, rent a VPS from Amazon or whomever. Export the USB drive as an NFS volume to the local lan, Run a cron job on the Pi that connects to the VPS over SSH and does an rsync. Done. If you want it locally encrypted you'll need an encrypted file system.
Error recovery is tricky of course. You can leave a copy of your files in the 'cloud' (depending on your situation could be good or could be bad). And it depends on whether you want it active/active (you can add files on either side) or active/passive (where the passive side is pulling the active side pushing).
Should cost about $100 or 80€ in parts per unit (so double that for two units). A bit more for the internet access and a monthly fee for the VPS. If its a lot of data there may be some bandwidth charges as well.
I understand your suggestion, but that seems to cost the same amount plus some hours of my time. And, the data is on a VPS, which is not under my roof (or a trusted persons roof). And I get another monthly bill.
I'm a user, this is what I want :)
Edit: Also, it should be easy to load the remote drive first locally with your dataset, before you drive to the summer cottage, so you don't have to wait days/weeks for the backup to be up to date.
Of course I (and the OP) can build one ourselves... but I want one that's easy to use. Ideally, just plug it in and configure its wifi access, and create some kind of "peer group" for it that my friends can join remotely with their own devices.
Then everyone in my peer group gets an encrypted backup of my files, and I get an encrypted backup of theirs.
The main difficulty will be making sure this baby has seriously expandable storage. I have terabytes of stuff to back up. So do the people I want to connect to. This thing needs to scale up to 10-20TB min to be useful today.
This could be avoided if encrypting files before uploading them to the web was the standard. Granted, the system wouldn't be as user friendly, but at least the chances of exposing your naked ass on the internet would decrease significantly.
A communication vault, built much like a burial vault (seriously, it's usually one company that casts both). It is made of thick concrete, buried underground, and (with a water intrusion alarm) fairly well protected from above-ground ills.
Pretty much, but the one Commcast was dropping in had an AC power feed, a set of lead acid battery boxes built into one side, and a moulded in space for holding about 40U of rack gear (telcom depth though so it looked like 12" not 40". Oh and a ladder in one side and a lockable lid. Very interesting kind of box.
We called those "CEVs", or Controlled Environment Vaults when I worked for the phone company. I felt like a secret agent the first time I went into one to build a T1 circuit. Just an unassuming lid at street level, but when you climb down the ladder (about 16 feet down to the bottom) you're in a 12' x 24~40' lair‡, with racks and cable frames, batteries, a little desk with an ancient teletype on it, some switch gear, etc. A whole secret world that most people don't know about. And these things are all over the place!
Nice to put a name to it, it was definitely a CEV. It wasn't quite that large but Googling around I can see that you've correctly identified it from my description.
Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house.
I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.