5 ms·

> What we need is a digital locker that encrypts all our data and stores it for us. Or, alternatively, we we need to simply do what people did for ages before

> What we need is a digital locker that encrypts all our data and stores it for us. Or, alternatively, we we need to simply do what people did for ages before us: buy a couple of hard drives and store this stuff offline. If people want to come see our photos, we can either grab them and email them over or they can come review them at our house. People keep talking the fix for technologies problems is more technology—but sometimes it's actually _less_ technology.

kaxline 8y ago
I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so that you're only paying a few dollars a month instead of large up front purchases. There's also a technical hurtle for the average person. Are they going to manually sync all their data from devices every time?
- nvahalik 8y ago
  Somewhat. There are (were?) some companies trying to break into a personal cloud (WD MyCloud) and I think companies like Buffalo and Synology are making it a lot easier to spend $500-600 and be able to reasonably protect your data from pretty much everything but fire (though, you can buy hard drives that claim fire protection, too). But at a deeper level, we claim that we want to store and keep all this data but do we need to? Really? I mean, back before digital photos, I took some (but not a lot) physical photos. They were dear to me. Still are. But now I have so many photos that I hardly ever look at them except for maybe a few that I've explicitly put into albums. A lot of them never get used. Perhaps even then we don't really need to protect all of it—if it was important to us then perhaps we really should think about how we'd protect it just like we'd protect those old photo albums that people leave with during hurricanes/flooding.
  - kaxline 8y ago
    My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.
- SamPatt 8y ago
  Syncthing is a great free tool. So is FreeNAS. Definitely not for mainstream users though.
stdcli 8y ago
This is why Blockstack exists. We also refer to our Gaia hubs as Digital Storage lockers: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html You can see the apps utilizing this framework on app.co My personal favorite right now is debutsocial.app It's a decentralized social network where every user owns their own data using gaia hubs. Would love your feedback!
- nvahalik 8y ago
  If my mom can't use it or I can't explain it to my mom then I'm probably not going to mess with it!
  - stdcli 8y ago
    I absolutely agree. This is my number one push on our Gaia team and we are working on that.
    - nvahalik 8y ago
      This was one of the things that really drove me to get a Drobo back in the day. I liked the idea that I could effectively just throw hard drives in it and it would run. And run it did. Slowly, but it worked!
      - stdcli 8y ago
        Drobo looks cool. That is the idea with gaia. Right now our master branch allows you to docker-compose-up and use the admin api calls to configure "disk" to however you want. The main motivation here was regardless of what images were deployed on optional cloud host providers, the default was set to local disk to support users actually owning this data locally. Additionally, we support a variety of other drivers, like azure blobs, etc. It is nice that the hubs are set up to interact with an API where developers by default are storing data in this decentralized way. I will check out Drobo more. "Slowly, but it worked!" making things work is important! haha
zanny 8y ago
> we can either grab them and email them over or they can come review them at our house. Better yet, we all have functional first class per-machine ipv6 addresses and our respectful ISPs provide us DNS records for convenience to route to our home machines. We can use credential-locked software to remote wake our computers, which then publish our data at our discretion and control via built in site hosting services. Since we all have gigabit landline fiber connections, having our peers and relatives just wake on demand our machines to browse our photos or videos is not an inconvenience. Since it was all built in to our freedom-respecting hardware and software it didn't require technical literacy to set up beyond creating your user account and using a wizard to associate devices via occupying the same LAN akin to how Bluetooth pairing works with confirm code dialogs. I might have ate something strange because these flying pigs spinning around my head are really tantalizing.

kaxline 8y ago

I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so that you're only paying a few dollars a month instead of large up front purchases. There's also a technical hurtle for the average person. Are they going to manually sync all their data from devices every time?

nvahalik 8y ago
Somewhat. There are (were?) some companies trying to break into a personal cloud (WD MyCloud) and I think companies like Buffalo and Synology are making it a lot easier to spend $500-600 and be able to reasonably protect your data from pretty much everything but fire (though, you can buy hard drives that claim fire protection, too). But at a deeper level, we claim that we want to store and keep all this data but do we need to? Really? I mean, back before digital photos, I took some (but not a lot) physical photos. They were dear to me. Still are. But now I have so many photos that I hardly ever look at them except for maybe a few that I've explicitly put into albums. A lot of them never get used. Perhaps even then we don't really need to protect all of it—if it was important to us then perhaps we really should think about how we'd protect it just like we'd protect those old photo albums that people leave with during hurricanes/flooding.
- kaxline 8y ago
  My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.
SamPatt 8y ago
Syncthing is a great free tool. So is FreeNAS. Definitely not for mainstream users though.

stdcli 8y ago

This is why Blockstack exists. We also refer to our Gaia hubs as Digital Storage lockers: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html You can see the apps utilizing this framework on app.co My personal favorite right now is debutsocial.app It's a decentralized social network where every user owns their own data using gaia hubs. Would love your feedback!

nvahalik 8y ago
If my mom can't use it or I can't explain it to my mom then I'm probably not going to mess with it!
- stdcli 8y ago
  I absolutely agree. This is my number one push on our Gaia team and we are working on that.
  - nvahalik 8y ago
    This was one of the things that really drove me to get a Drobo back in the day. I liked the idea that I could effectively just throw hard drives in it and it would run. And run it did. Slowly, but it worked!
    - stdcli 8y ago
      Drobo looks cool. That is the idea with gaia. Right now our master branch allows you to docker-compose-up and use the admin api calls to configure "disk" to however you want. The main motivation here was regardless of what images were deployed on optional cloud host providers, the default was set to local disk to support users actually owning this data locally. Additionally, we support a variety of other drivers, like azure blobs, etc. It is nice that the hubs are set up to interact with an API where developers by default are storing data in this decentralized way. I will check out Drobo more. "Slowly, but it worked!" making things work is important! haha

zanny 8y ago

> we can either grab them and email them over or they can come review them at our house. Better yet, we all have functional first class per-machine ipv6 addresses and our respectful ISPs provide us DNS records for convenience to route to our home machines. We can use credential-locked software to remote wake our computers, which then publish our data at our discretion and control via built in site hosting services. Since we all have gigabit landline fiber connections, having our peers and relatives just wake on demand our machines to browse our photos or videos is not an inconvenience. Since it was all built in to our freedom-respecting hardware and software it didn't require technical literacy to set up beyond creating your user account and using a wizard to associate devices via occupying the same LAN akin to how Bluetooth pairing works with confirm code dialogs. I might have ate something strange because these flying pigs spinning around my head are really tantalizing.