How to put all your data on the Web without storing it in the cloud | Hacker News Reader

How to put all your data on the Web without storing it in the cloud

arstechnica.com

33 pointsminm24 comments

This can also be done with entirely Free Software (for those that care about such things) by combining things like OwnCloud (http://owncloud.org/) and MediaGoblin (http://www.mediagoblin.org/), and maybe PageKite (https://pagekite.net/) if port forwarding is not an option.

I think OwnCloud has a mobile interface and syncing features as well now.

Also git-powered http://sparkleshare.org/

I am very excited and waiting for http://git-annex.branchable.com/

That's git-annex, which has been available for a long time; the new thing is git-annex assistant, which is a Dropbox-like addon for g-a. That said, wait no more! The Assistant has been available since the 24th: http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/

PageKite looks interesting. Although when I read the list under "without PageKite, you would have to:" it seems easier than PageKite. Crazy I know. :) (The catch I think is getting that static reachable IP. Most people do not have that. But I think there are workarounds.)

Question: Why the base64 encoding instead of a simple gzipped tar file? Also why instruct people to feed untrusted stuff from the internet directly into bash via curl? That is definitely not safe as a matter of policy.

But I like the idea of PacketKite. Nicely done.

Also curious about Dalpay. Are they a good alternative to PayPal?

The main point of PageKite is converting a networking/sysadmin problem, into a software problem. This has fundamental implications for scaling it out (software copying scales infinitely, sysadmins don't).

I ended up with the weird merged python file (see: http://pagekite.net/wiki/Floss/PyBreeder/) because I wanted the continued perceived simplicity of a single .py, but I ended up wanting to refactor my code into submodules. So I made PyBreeder to reverse the refactoring, basically. It is a little silly and will probably go away over time. Regarding the bash installer, I don't see much of a difference between trusting my installer or trusting pagekite itself. Both came from the network. The bash installer is at least easier to review than "install.exe" or the shell scripts embedded in an RPM or .deb. My goal was to get people up and running in literally two commands, this was the only cross-distro/cross-OS way to accomplish that.

Dalpay are OK, but they have their warts. I'd rather deal with a small local company than a monster like PayPal, and being in Iceland my options for actually receiving funds from PayPal and the likes were actually rather limited.

It looks like you need to pay for the Owncloud mobile apps. Little confused about the free software claim. I am nothing against paying for a good software.

Interesting, I didn't know the apps were closed. (edit: seems they're not, source code is here: https://gitorious.org/owncloud/android-main)

My point was not price though, but freedom. If people are looking to move out of the cloud and take things home, I suspect this is at least in part driven by an urge to take control of their data and become more independent.

Controlling the tools is, by many, considered to be an important part of that.

Thanks for the Info.

I've always been surprised that GPL-licensed Dropbox-clone iFolder hasn't gotten more attention: http://ifolder.com/ Sponsored by Novell, last release within the past year, seems fairly robust. I've looked at it but never set it up since I'm comfortable just encrypting my Dropbox content. And Dropbox is so convenient and increasingly integrated with other applications (I use it with Epistle, for example). But I'm curious if anyone has tried iFolder out...

I'm pretty interested in something like this. It seems to me that all these services like Dropbox and Google Drive are charging for something the vast majority of people don't need - online storage of data - when what they really want is just sync of data between devices. While storing the data online makes the process more user friendly, it opens up a raft of other problems like legal liability and of course, most of these services are built around models that charge for storage, so you end up paying more and more the longer you use them.

I'm sad that LiveMesh is being retired by Microsoft as it actually did exactly what I want - just P2P sync. I'm looking into OwnCloud at the moment.

So basically this is good if you need the flexibility of Cloud based apps like Dropbox or Box with the convenience of data ownership and storage.

It is interesting to see that folks can "replace" dropbox with ftp/ssh/rsync/webdav etc. But the strength of dropbox or similar solution (self-hosted or otherwise) is the consumability model (music transcoded and streamed, Photos resized and presented as slideshows, controlled share support). With more and more access to the data coming from mobile clients, the differentiation of these services from those "traditional access services" are their support for new mobile clients/OSes.

Out of every person I have ever met that uses Dropbox, I don't know of a single person that cares about music encoding or picture resizing.

I am assuming you have not met all the users of Dropbox then? Clearly there are people (like me) who do care about consuming the data other than just downloading them as raw files.

raises hand I love Dropbox's media-presentation features. Without them I'd probably use something else.

Are you saying the usability of these apps don't matter. Atleast I care about the slideshows. Music playing is very rudimentary in dropbox. Tonido scores better when it Comes to music -plays flac.

Looks like running your own dropbox from your desktop

I use duplicity http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ in conjunction with S3 (and possibly Glacier soon) to store encrypted backups. the data's in "the cloud" but is encrypted.

I used to wait for AeroFS to mature, but now I just use encfs on Dropbox and that's my syncing problem solved. As for backups, I'm currently using SpiderOak. I haven't found anything cheaper (on the order of Glacier) that supports encrypted backups. Hopefully there will be a tool like duplicity (which, unfortunately, I've had bad luck with) for Glacier.

I tried to use Duplicity a few times with WebDAV (for box.com), and it kept freezing, becoming unable to resume the transfer, unable to see that I have files on the share even when I managed to upload all the files with the desktop client, and various other bugs. It's not as robust as I'd like, sadly.

I use duplicity with my tonido home server for my backups. Tonido is also a webdav server. Duplicity works well With Tonido.

I use boxcrypt with dropbox and it seems like a pretty good solution to the concerns about storing sensitive data on someone elses server

sshd and an scp/sftp client?

email it to yourself

http://www.zdnet.com/no-personal-data-on-google-apps-norway-...

If trends like this continue there is good potential for selfhosted personal clouds.

Definitely.

I've been doing it for years. You can use a WebDAV share in Apache and mount it from Windows XP and above. That's pretty much DropBox with COTS software there.

I switched to Skydrive in 2009 though as it's just easier and it (at the time) supposed machine->machine replication with Live Mesh.

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