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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN! I started working on this after my old cloud backup service (CrashPlan) announced they were discontinuing their Home product. My cofounder Cory and I built this to meet our own needs, and also for our families to use, most of whom are non-technical. We're working really hard to make Relica the best backup solution for a broad range of consumers, from everyday users to more technical professionals with specific needs. Besides ourselves, my mother and my brother are among Relica's first users.

We're really excited to share the beginning of our product! I'm personally a bit terrified, too. :) We have a lot of great features planned, besides the ones we've already implemented. (Coming soon: back up to your own cloud destinations such as your own S3 account or SFTP destinations.)

Feel free to sign up, give it a spin, share your referral link with others to get discounts, and let us know what you think!

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Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete? This is all I want in a backup service. Install on all my devices (this must include mobile devices too), send everything I care about to as many destinations as I provide, all of which I manage myself.

As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out. If I can just have it in my own S3 bucket, I can do absolutely anything I like with my files. Count me as very interested if this is where you're going.

Also, trust and security are going to be huge. How do I know you're not going to leak and / or abuse the depth of access you get by owning my backups?

Great questions!

> Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?

If you edit your backup, you can create a custom hook (https://relicabackup.com/docs/backup-hooks). We plan to implement email notifications when such events occur as well.

> As great as cloud backup solutions are, the weak point is always getting things out.

We're implementing "Bring your own cloud" now, so you can provide your own S3-compatible, SFTP, Azure, or Google storage (more to come). This feature is almost done.

> Also, trust and security are going to be huge.

Backups are encrypted on the client, and the key is kept on your local device (don't lose it!). We can't access your data, and even your file selection is encrypted.

It seems to me that the "Can I sign up somewhere to get notified when "back up to your own cloud destinations" is complete?" actually implied if there's a way to get notified when the "Bring your own cloud" feature is complete and in production so that we can give your service a test then.

If I guessed that wrong, then anyway please answer because I want to know that too. Thanks!

Oh. :) That makes sense. We're in the process of setting up a mailing list - in the meantime, can you drop us a quick email at support@relicabackup.com and we'll make sure to send you a notification when this feature is ready?

I’d suggest sticking a quick Mailchimp form on your site for this—I bet you’ll get a lot of emails.

This looks like a great service—nice work!

Question: if the encryption key is kept on the device, how can I access data from another device?

More importantly, if my local device dies I'm going to want to restore from backup. Now what?

As long as your backup isn't stored on the same device that died -- i.e. if you have access to the destination/repository -- you can restore by accessing it with the encryption password (which only you know).

Ah man I must have needed another coffee - had my wires crossed. Thanks for clarifying

The actual key is stored at the destination inside the repository, encrypted by a password that you have to enter (doesn't matter the device). So don't lose the password. Technically there are a few keys in play: https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/100_references.html#...

Anyway, if you know your encryption password, you can perform a restore from any device with access to the destination.

Cool, that makes more sense.

Update: We added a newsletter signup form on the bottom of the home page!

Slightly off-topic: I love the simplicity of your website design. Did you make it yourself, or use a template/theme?

Thanks - I'm kinda surprised to hear that feedback, since I made it myself real quick as a holdover while we launched... we have plans to fill it out a little more.

The pages will all be revamped, but now we'll focus on keeping it simple.

(I make all my sites without templates/themes -- from-scratch HTML in an editor, because that's what I'm used to... it doesn't take very long and I know 100% what's going on as I make it. My cofounder Cory is more of the front-end guru though so we'll use the best tools between what we know!)

Your website is an example of what good web design should look like. It's fast, clean, doesn't load extraneous crap and almost all of it works without JavaScript (which I block by default). Most "Show HN" posts I open and close immediately when I see (or, often enough, don't see anything at all) their website. Instead, you have a new trial subscriber.

Awesome, that's great to know! Thank you -- we'll try to keep to it.

This is very off-topic, but if you ever feel like sharing your web development process in a blog post (or any other medium), describing how you stay productive doing a website from scratch, I'd love to read and share it. There is a real shortage of modern web development material that doesn't start with "download bloated framework X along with Y different tools for no particular reason".

Just a thought. :)

You can get a long way with a static site generator (hugo, jekyll, etc) and SASS (and optionally a minimal framework like inuit.css which mainly deals with keeping your padding/margins/line-heights consistent).

I like that idea -- going to find some time to write!

Have you thought about backing up storage providers (pcloud, Dropbox, google etc...)?

We have, yep. Google Photos, too. I've already got a PoC for that, but it'll take some time for us to integrate it into Relica. Great suggestion!

Have you think of integrating your service into hardware storage backup boxes, NAS etc.

I feel the firmware of those proprietary firmwares have been insecure and slow and non-cross platform compatible.

That's a great idea -- not really sure where to start with that, so we'll have to look into it!

If you do it as a docker container, then I should be able to load that on my Synology NAS, which would make me and my wife (and the rest of my family) very happy!

Alright - Added it to our list!

FYI, the Synology Community site is at https://synocommunity.com/

A killer starting place for me would be FreeBSD builds to support FreeNAS.

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