When it comes to data, I’m a pack rat. I’m one of those people who has an archive of all mails since pretty much the first day I had an e-mail address. Now that we’re putting more and more stuff into the cloud, it’s getting increasingly hard to keep this up.
I’ve been looking for a way to collect and archive my data from social networks, online services (such as Flickr) but also things like e-mail, Google Docs and regular files.
Backupify comes close, but when we’re combining this much data, I’d love to have a bit of privacy. The idea of turning over all my private data to yet another service [1] doesn’t appeal to me all that much.
Spideroak nails the privacy aspect but only seems to be doing files. In their model, it is completely impossible for them to read your data, as you are the only person holding the key (unlike Dropbox).
Anyone has some suggestions of a digital archive that is capable of combining files/folders and online services? On-site or off-site doesn’t matter, as long as it gets the privacy right. Bonus points if it has full-text indexing and search.
Update [Jun 5, 2011]: Interesting, yet very young and unstable candidate: The Locker Project
[1] Considering how even a giant like Sony screwed this up, I do not consider privacy a nice-to-have luxury anymore.
Like this one, yet digital.
Frank Groeneveld
I’m not sure if this is what you want, but you should really have a look at Wuala. It’s like Dropbox, but everything is encrypted on your own machine and you can use it for free by trading local storage space with other (anonymous) users.
Rodney Dawes
If you want actual secure data storage, the only way to do it is to ensure that data was never on a networked computer in the first place.
Encryption is only a marginal deterrent and not an absolute safeguard.
If you are looking for a full suite of on-line services though, https://one.ubuntu.com is where it’s at. :)
Seth
True to an extent. UbuntuOne is a bit to much interspersed with commerce for my intuition of _right_
Andrés G. Aragoneses
Is Wuala open source? And Spideroak? If not, is there an alternative to them that is open source? Does somebody offer SparkleShare hosting?
Seth
Tarsnap will go a loooong ways to meeting the goals.
Written by Colin Percival, one of people specificly involved with managing security for FreeBSD. I trust my bits to him. In all honesty I’m not paranoid enough/too pragmatic and still keep most of my bits on S3/VPS by my own means, but, I _do_ trust my bits with tarsnap, as far as software security is concerned
daniel
http://www.tarsnap.com/
Aidan Delaney
I tend to simply use DejaDup (https://live.gnome.org/DejaDup) over ssh. I have a 500Gb drive in a NAS on my fixed-ip home ADSL line. Though, DejaDup will aslo do encrypted backup to Amazon S3.
Ruben
Lots of great responses already, thanks everyone! Most of the suggestions seem to be backup solutions for files. I have a good backup strategy in place.
What I’m also looking for is long-time archival of online services. Does such a thing exist?
Andrius Bentkus
Nothing is more interesting than hording hording hording :D
Judy D'cruz
Another option in the backup field that is definitely worth a look is SysCloudSoft. They backup unlimited Google Apps data with an on premise and online option.
They also allow users to backup personal Gmail accounts free. I backed up my Gmail account and Google Apps for free.
go to http://www.syscloudsoft.com to download free software