4 ms·

Syncing vs. saving, and the case for a home storage cloud

10 points by markbao 18y ago

snprbob86 18y ago
Isn't this what Ray Ozzy is trying to do with Live Mesh?
smanek 18y ago
To me, it sounds very similar to just using some sort of revision control system. I keep my home directory in revision control on dreamhost (svn now, but meaning to upgrade to git) to keep my three desktops and laptop in sync (plus a pretty web gui for doing stuff remotely). And, for media, several years ago I put together 8 250G drives into a RAID5 (with 1 hot spare) giving me 1.5TB of storage. It was fairly impressive at the time ... I think the biggest problem with the idea of a 'storage cloud' is the lack of ubiquitous bandwidth/internet access ... It would be amazing to have network access be so pervasive that we didn't need iPods with storage - they could just access our 'cloud' of media from anywhere in the world. I don't know much about EM - would something like that even be technically possible (ignoring the feasibility issue for a moment)? A guy can dream ...
- witten 18y ago
  I don't think you'd absolutely need ubiquitous internet access if the underlying "cloud" was based on a network filesystem that supported disconnected operation. So some files would be synced/cached locally. And then when you went off-network you'd still have access to (some of) them.
  - smanek 18y ago
    that still doesn't solve the problems of different devices having different capacities. For example, my entire music collection is ~100GB (on my file server at home). On my laptop, I can afford to devote ~40GB to music, and on my iPod I can get ~30GB. The only way I can think of to solve this sort of problem (i.e., guarantee that I always have access to the song I'm looking for) is to have network access. And then I get 'synchronization' for free since all my data is in one place anyways.
timcederman 18y ago
I have a Mac Mini at home with 2TB of attached storage (mirrored RAID to 1TB). I use Offline Files to keep a copy of my data on all my laptops (including VMWare Fusion for my Macbook). For my laptops with smaller hard drives, I keep less stuff available offline. It works perfectly - I couldn't function without it, and the redundancy/convenience is awesome. Having a Mac Mini I can then use as a media centre as well is a nice bonus. Cost the same as buying an embedded Linux solution too (such as a Thecus box).

10 points by markbao 18y ago

Isn't this what Ray Ozzy is trying to do with Live Mesh?

To me, it sounds very similar to just using some sort of revision control system. I keep my home directory in revision control on dreamhost (svn now, but meaning to upgrade to git) to keep my three desktops and laptop in sync (plus a pretty web gui for doing stuff remotely). And, for media, several years ago I put together 8 250G drives into a RAID5 (with 1 hot spare) giving me 1.5TB of storage. It was fairly impressive at the time ... I think the biggest problem with the idea of a 'storage cloud' is the lack of ubiquitous bandwidth/internet access ... It would be amazing to have network access be so pervasive that we didn't need iPods with storage - they could just access our 'cloud' of media from anywhere in the world. I don't know much about EM - would something like that even be technically possible (ignoring the feasibility issue for a moment)? A guy can dream ...

witten 18y ago
I don't think you'd absolutely need ubiquitous internet access if the underlying "cloud" was based on a network filesystem that supported disconnected operation. So some files would be synced/cached locally. And then when you went off-network you'd still have access to (some of) them.
- smanek 18y ago
  that still doesn't solve the problems of different devices having different capacities. For example, my entire music collection is ~100GB (on my file server at home). On my laptop, I can afford to devote ~40GB to music, and on my iPod I can get ~30GB. The only way I can think of to solve this sort of problem (i.e., guarantee that I always have access to the song I'm looking for) is to have network access. And then I get 'synchronization' for free since all my data is in one place anyways.

timcederman 18y ago

I have a Mac Mini at home with 2TB of attached storage (mirrored RAID to 1TB). I use Offline Files to keep a copy of my data on all my laptops (including VMWare Fusion for my Macbook). For my laptops with smaller hard drives, I keep less stuff available offline. It works perfectly - I couldn't function without it, and the redundancy/convenience is awesome. Having a Mac Mini I can then use as a media centre as well is a nice bonus. Cost the same as buying an embedded Linux solution too (such as a Thecus box).