Babylon
Secure online storage for Linux
Once in your lifetime you will loose important data from hard drive failures, theft or stupidity. You will need disaster safe backups ...
- Off-site
- Encrypted. (Encrypting the data transfer (as in HTTPS) or encrypting on the server is not sufficient.)
- Selective (Simple access to the important stuff)
- Efficient (Incremental)
- Affordable (for a life time)
- Reliable (on a long time scale)
- Automated (In practise no one burns DVDs and brings them to a friend's house on a regular basis.)
Any decent server could do the job, but maintaining a dedicated server is too expensive in terms of time, energy and bandwidth for personal use. So I'm looking for a suitable service.
| * rsync.net: | USD 19.20 | = EUR 13.27 | per GB and year |
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From a technological standpoint rsync.net rules anything I could find: A full featured filesystem accessible through standard UNIX protocols (ssh!). Use with rsyncrypto or duplicity.
| * Amazon S3: | USD 1.80 | = EUR 1.24 | per GB (storage) and year |
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| + | USD 0.27 | = EUR 0.19 | per GB up and download |
| + | USD 0.11 | = EUR 0.08 | per 10000 PUT and GET requests |
| = | USD 2.18 | = EUR 1.51 | (estimated) per year to backup 1 GB |
Amazon's Simple Storage service is the cheapest storage service I'm aware of. They provide a simple database and web API, which can be used like a filesystem when using some client software that does the trick (key = path and filename, object = binary data). A commercial client (command line and GUI) with built-in encryption and automated backups is JungleDisk (Linux, Windows, Mac; USD 20.00 = EUR 13.83). There are quite a number of open source tools, I tend to like s3tools (s3cmd, s3sync, ...) (Ruby, all platforms) most. Note that different S3 applications may use incompatible storage schemes.
| * getdropbox.com: | free | 2GB |
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Dropbox provides a closed source daemon, which will communicate with their server through a proprietary protocol to sync a local directory. Requires a recent version of Gnome. An AJAX web interface (for browsers) is available, too. For encrypted backups, you will rely on locally running rsyncrypto or similar.
| * box.net: | free | 1GB | |
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| USD 65.88 | = EUR 45.56 | for 5GB per year |
Box.net's main access method is a through a web browser. They also provide a web API, which can be used by clients on your computer as well as by other web sites. Rumor suggests WebDAV support. Again, you will have to care about crypto yourself.
| * Memopal: | USD 49.00 | or EUR 49.00 | for 150GB per year |
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Memopal is designed for full disk backups. The Linux client is beta and closed source. The trial period (applies for beta testers, too) is way too short. Their TOS ("Memopal can store Customer data on its server without obligation or responsibility to the Customer. ") are far from what I'd expect of a paid service, especially for backups. Update: While Memopal uses encrypted data transfers and a sophisticated storage schema, which they claim is designed with privacy in mind, the data can be retrieved without knowledge of a decryption key (or passphrase). Hence, the data is effectively unencrypted by my standards. At current exchange rates, Memopal is apparently cheaper when you pay in US Dollars.
All mentioned services support Windows and Mac clients, too. There are many similar services around. Choose wisely.