Ask HN: Online backup without a computer?
I'm going to be travelling for about 3 months, and won't be taking my laptop with me. My technology will largely be restricted to a camera with a 4GB SD card, an iPod touch, and a 250GB USB HD. My plan is to dump my photos from the camera to the HD at such times as I get access to a computer, but I don't like that being a SPOF, so I'd really like an online backup too.
I can, of course, carry software on the HD that could be installed temporarily on computers I'm using in order to manage this, but I'd like to minimise the amount of hoops I'll need to jump through at each location (i.e. installing Cygwin everywhere to run rsync isn't really an option!)
I have my own server that I can upload to, but I'm also open to software that stores data on S3 or wherever (this will hopefully be write once, read never!)
Suggestions?
(Alternatives also welcome, e.g. "Don't bother with online backup: just carry a couple of extra SD cards and backup to those", but online backup has the added benefit of being more resistant to everything getting stolen / destroyed when I fall into a lake / whatever)
28 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 61.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.getdropbox.com/
You can get 2gb for free, or pay for more if you need it. If you need more than you're able to pay for, you could have a home PC syncing the stuff to another location and removing the original to free up the space.
I also got the impression that Dropbox doesn't cope so well with being run from a different computer every day, and would want to sync all my existing stored files down onto the computer I happen to be using that day, which isn't so good. And AIUI I'd need to make double-double-sure I'd uninstalled it from each when I was done, and notify Dropbox that this machine is no longer active etc. But I admit I haven't dug too deeply into all that yet.
Have a look at this (I just took a peek at it this morning, it's built by another HN poster):
https://beta.tarsnap.com/
All my tools and stuff exactly where I expect it and no chance of having my email or ssh stuff compromised because of some nifty keyboard sniffing virus in an internet cafe. Usually the owners don't mind the reboot.
As long as you pay was usually the attitude.
The more advanced internet cafe's (usually with a card based system where you buy a pre-paid card with some time on it) are more difficult.
You will need a reasonably fast Internet access to use the online backup. Depending on where you will be traveling, you may run into upstream bandwidth being severely restricted.
Set up your camera to save the photos to in different folders based on date, then just get some web space, go to ftp://yoursite/ and drag&drop the photos.
It's low tech, but it's almost guaranteed to work from anywhere, and you're less likely to get kicked out for "hacking" when you don't have a cygwin terminal open.
You can also take 7z to pack everything. I also carry winscp if I feel like uploading something like docs
What's a good SCP/FTP-over-SSH client for Windows? Filezilla seems to work OK, but is a little clunky (on the Mac, anyhow. I don't have a windows machine to hand to test it on)
It comes in a standalone install-nothing flavour and lets you choose, when copying a group of files from A to B, to only copy files that have changed.
I'm not aware of what algorithm is used to determine when a file has changed. I've always assumed this is based on file modification time so this might not be clever enough to spot a partially-uploaded file and either re-copy or start from where it left off.
You can certainly pause file transfers and subsequently resume but only during a session.
Then you could write a simple script to do an rsync-over-ssh to your server, and just run it directly from the USB drive.
It would probably be best to test it on at least both Vista and XP systems, to make sure it works.
I'd use ssh keys, so that you don't have to worry about keystroke logging. You could also make a user for it on your server side, and lock it down to just allow the rsync in.
Look into the '--link-dest' option to rsync, this allows you to really easily do incremental backups, each time you backup your new backup directory has all the files in it, but any files that haven't changed are hardlinked to the previous version, so you don't take up much disk space. Really, really cool.
I wouldn't want to pollute my normal stream with the 95% of dross that I'll doubtless take, but setting the default visibility to private could work well.
ISTR that flickr does some processing of the images as you upload them though, and don't really like the idea of losing the originals, but perhaps that only impacts the lower res versions, and the original always stays intact. Must investigate further...
It doesn't need to be installed, you can just run it from the drive, and it can transfer via FTP or SSH to a cheap slicehost or dreamhost. I even think it supports syncing directories, so you can just resume where you left off.
The current plan involves being in about 20 countries over the course of just under 3 months. So let's say 90 days x 50-100 photos per day x 2-3MB per picture. That gives somewhere in the region of 16GB right there; with backup, twice that. And that's probably on the low side.
Hmmm. I'm going to need more space (and more upload bandwidth) than I thought!