On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 07:40:58AM -0400, Duncan Hutty wrote:
> An open source client is a step towards that: http://www.tarsnap.com
> is an online backup service with an open source client. Tarsnap is
> written/run by the FreeBSD security chap, Colin Percival. (No
> affiliation, not even a customer, but I'll probably use it for
> important, personal things (at least), if I decide to get more
> rigourous than just distributed git repos.)

Yeah.  something like that.  But it'd be nice if I could upload to 
more than one provider, and something cheaper than amazon, and have
more of the stuff done on the client and less on the server. 

I was thinking, for example, if you had a standard sftp, rsync,
webdav, git, or some other FUSE-able interface, the client could
just fuse-mount the backup provider, then the client could use 
truecrypt to encrypt it.  You could use practically any space
provider as the backing store.   

Hm.  but yeah, I should look into tarsnap more.   If the server was
also open-source, I could setup a competing tarsnap service and say
my usual "Well, Colin knows what he's doing and will provide better
service than I can, but hey, cheaper is a kind of better too, right?"

Hm.  It doesn't look as if the server is open source.   I wonder if 
cpersiva would be okay licensing it to me?  I'd be okay giving him a 
percentage of revenue;  I don't know  how he'd feel about a cheap
competitor, but I could make an argument that it could enable him to reach
other (cheaper) markets;  I dono how much it'd cut into his primary 
market;  I mean, my target is like a penny a gigabyte (I'd charge a 
premium if I had to license it, but you know, like two cents a gigabyte.
so it'd be pretty dramatically cheaper than anything you could do with 
ec2.  But, we're talking a raid6 in one box in san jose vs. six replications
in geographically separate data centers, so my stuff would be lower-quality, 
too.)

But yeah, really?  I need a backup solution for my own customers,
one not managed by me.  (It's not a backup if one guy screwing it
up can kill both your production and your backup.)  If you host with me,
you need to backup somewhere else.    Problem is, most backup providers
want to, you know, make money, and they charge more than  the sort
of people that pay me for hosting want to pay. 

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