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Basic
Free
10 GB
No credit card required
IDrive® Mini
$2.95 per year One user
100 GB
$9.95 per year
500 GB
IDrive® Personal
$99.50/year$69.65 first year
One user, Multiple computers
5 TB Storage
We'd heard of SwissDisk here at rsync.net, but they rarely showed up on our radar screen. We were reminded of their existence a few days ago when their entire infrastructure failed. It's unclear how much data, if any, was eventually lost ... but my reading of their announcement makes me think "a lot".
I'm commenting on this because I believe their failure was due to an unnecessarily complex infrastructure. Of course, this requires a lot of conjecture on my part about an organization I know little about ... but I'm pretty comfortable making some guesses.
It's en vogue these days to build filesystems across a SAN and build an application layer on top of that SAN platform that deals with data as "objects" in a database, or something resembling a database. All kinds of advantages are then presented by this infrastructure, from survivability and fault tolerance to speed and latency. And cost. That is, when you look out to the great green future and the billions of transactions you handle every day from your millions of customers are all realized, the per unit cost is strikingly low.
It is my contention that, in the context of offsite storage, these models are too complex, and present risks that the end user is incapable of evaluating. I can say this with some certainty, since we have seen that the model presented risks that even the people running it were incapable of evaluating.
This is indeed an indictment of "cloud storage", which may seem odd coming from the proprietor of what seems to be "cloud storage". It makes sense, however, when you consider the very broad range of infrastructure that can be used to deliver "online backup". When you don't have stars in your eyes, and aren't preparing for your IPO filing and the "hockey sticking" of your business model, you can do sensible things like keep regular files on UFS2 filesystems on standalone FreeBSD systems.
This is, of course, laughable in the "real world". You couldn't possibly support thousands and thousands of customers around the globe, for nearly a decade, using such an infrastructure. Certainly not without regular interruption and failure.
Except when you can, I guess:
# uptime
12:48PM up 350 days, 21:34, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.14, 0.16
(a live storage system, with about a thousand users, that I picked at random)
# uptime
2:02PM up 922 days, 18:38, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(another system on the same network)
Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.
In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
We survey existing approaches to data storage and sharing, ranging from email attachments to web apps to Firebase-backed mobile apps, and we examine the trade-offs of each. We look at Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): data structures that are multi-user from the ground up while also being fundamentally local and private. CRDTs have the potential to be a foundational technology for realizing local-first software.
I was interested in trying out a service like OneDrive or Dropbox, but one thing always held me back: the idea that at any moment, and for any reason, the company could lock me out of my files.
The problem
No one wants to have their data held hostage by a third-party. How can you get the benefits of using cloud storage while also retaining ownership rights and having a level of assurance that your files will always be accessible?
The solution
Luckily, there’s a simple solution: Perform full backups of your cloud files in an environment that you control.
"Backup your data, you say?! What a novel idea!" /S
The setup
I use rclone
to sync files from my cloud storage accounts to a VM running Alpine Linux. rclone
works with over 40 cloud storage providers, has a very easy-to-use CLI, and works with modern authentication systems.
A cron job runs daily, pulling down any file changes into the backup.
I have the replication job set to exhaustively copy all files in the account to the local machine.