Today is World Backup Day
worldbackupday.com
worldbackupday.com
The original blog post was removed (for legal reasons?), here is the cached version of it - http://goo.gl/E1gKN
But anyone can use the name! We just wanted to protect our visitors. I am just a college student and the site was hand-coded & designed by this awesome redditor who just graduated highschool.
But I don't see the need of legal actions around such a thing.
I had some trouble with scammy companies and I wanted to protect people from thinking we were endorsing them. That's all
I can freaking declare this as the 'LOVE RIKA DAY' :P who cares about it anyway? if someone does, then good!
I just didn't want people to mess up their computer because they downloaded something that seemed to be endorsed us (fyi, we don't endorse anyone). That's all.
I just wanted want a nice event for everyone. :(
As a tech company CEO who has to deal a lot with lawyers, I'm not surprised this happened. Most of us in tech view lawyers as a necessary evil to be used sparingly. Lawyers often view themselves as protectors of original ideas. They often don't understand the social structure in which most techies operate.
So, I'm sure as a 20 something college student who hasn't experienced this yet, you lean on authority. If you have a bad experience with the first World Backup Day and someone tells you lawyers can prevent that, then you go and find a lawyer. The right thing to do would have been to use the community to police it and point out the scammers, but it's hard to understand the dynamics of these interactions until you have been through them.
Let me just say that Backupify supports World Backup Day, and intends to be a sponsor sometime in the future. We are on good terms with the founder, and I think his attorney was just a bit overzealous with enforcement.
My expectation and understanding of the future is that World Backup Day will belong to the community, and anyone will be able to discuss it, but to be a formal sponsor and be listed on the WBD site will be a paid option. I think that sounds fine.
It's like as if Pi day was brought to you by Wolfram Mathematica with a sprinkle of MatLab coupons.
(edit) MathLab -> MatLab
I'm just a college student in [redacted] and the site was coded & designed by a guy who just graduated high school in [redacted].
Why doesn't anyone believe me? I live in my parent's house and I got a broken car. I love HN because it helped inspire me to do something. That's all. I'm almost crying here. :'(
Please call me at [redacted] if you don't believe me.
The "right" way to have done this would be to form a non-profit and then be accountable for the money raised, however I don't really see the need for raising money where the only cost is a simple website. The commercialization is what leaves a bad taste.
[1] http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4001:dn...
I learned my lesson. I don't know too much about legal stuff so I'll look into making non-profit. I didn't want to ask for money from people and companies were asking for sponsor World Backup Day. I thought was a nice gesture. Last year, I had a link to bone marrow registry and even had tied the message of being a "backup for a human" to get people to sign up for the registry. I wanted to do something this year, but we ran out of time to settle & create graphics for another cause.
I just wanted it to be a happy and helpful event before April Fool's Day. That is all.
Just to give a bit more information, I started off with using the rsync/snapshot method (rsync to a remote drive, then cp -al to create hard links into a snapshot directory). But I didn't like that the clients needed to have root access to the backup server (yes I could resolve most of that through fancy ssh authorized_keys file scripting). Also I needed compression (was using ZFS with compression originally). So I designed "snebu" (simple network backup utility) to store compressed files on the backup server similar to how Git stores objects (using the sha1 checksum to name the files), and I keep all the metadata in an Sqlite database. That way, I have the simplicity of something like rsync, but with some of the features of the heavy-weight backup programs (like Bacula, Amanda, etc) but with a slightly easier setup.
I'm in the middle of re-writing the documentation, so I'm sort of looking for feedback on if the current docs don't quite explain things good enough.
Thanks.
0: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178...
They offer a 30-day trial. If you try it, like it enough and are willing to wait, they often have promotions for the first year (for Black Friday last year, it was a tiered discount depending on how early you signed up).
I crash my 100k dollar car, and I think, damn, I'd give 100k to get it back. But when insuring it, I don't pay 100k for insurance! You have to take value x probability of loss to arrive at your X.
Just multiplying by the probability is what's known as "risk neutral" - it works and is a very good approximation when the dollar amounts amounts are small compared to your net worth. It tends not to be a good approximation when the dollar amounts are higher.
Of course, a realistic analysis would also account for the fact the the "data loss insurance" itself is probabilistic, but this is a start.
You really need to sort out something for passwords; software registrations; and logins. This is a tiny bit of backup, but it'll make life easier if your drive dies.