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I want someone at HN to build a small network device which I can plug a NAS or USB drive into. Buy a pair, install one at your buddies/mothers house. They find

I want someone at HN to build a small network device which I can plug a NAS or USB drive into. Buy a pair, install one at your buddies/mothers house. They find each other over magically over the internet and any data you put on the local drive gets encrypted and put on the other remote drive. Other drive burns down / is stolen, no problem. Your house burns down, go and pick up your photos, enter your passphrase. I'll pay 200€ or so. The hard part is convincing another million people they want one, I guess.

klinquist 12y ago
I believe this is the rough idea behind https://www.spacemonkey.com/ https://www.spacemonkey.com/
- cromulent 12y ago
  Similar, but not quite. I want something where I can retrieve it by sneaker net and it is basically under my control.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Seriously? That's a pretty straight forward project. Buy a USB drive, buy a Rasberry Pi, rent a VPS from Amazon or whomever. Export the USB drive as an NFS volume to the local lan, Run a cron job on the Pi that connects to the VPS over SSH and does an rsync. Done. If you want it locally encrypted you'll need an encrypted file system. Error recovery is tricky of course. You can leave a copy of your files in the 'cloud' (depending on your situation could be good or could be bad). And it depends on whether you want it active/active (you can add files on either side) or active/passive (where the passive side is pulling the active side pushing). Should cost about $100 or 80€ in parts per unit (so double that for two units). A bit more for the internet access and a monthly fee for the VPS. If its a lot of data there may be some bandwidth charges as well.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  You can use attic, although it will need a cheap VPS, it doesn't work with S3: https://attic-backup.org https://attic-backup.org Writeup here: http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
- swombat 12y ago
  Of course I (and the OP) can build one ourselves... but I want one that's easy to use. Ideally, just plug it in and configure its wifi access, and create some kind of "peer group" for it that my friends can join remotely with their own devices. Then everyone in my peer group gets an encrypted backup of my files, and I get an encrypted backup of theirs. The main difficulty will be making sure this baby has seriously expandable storage. I have terabytes of stuff to back up. So do the people I want to connect to. This thing needs to scale up to 10-20TB min to be useful today.
- cromulent 12y ago
  Yes, seriously. I understand your suggestion, but that seems to cost the same amount plus some hours of my time. And, the data is on a VPS, which is not under my roof (or a trusted persons roof). And I get another monthly bill. I'm a user, this is what I want :) Edit: Also, it should be easy to load the remote drive first locally with your dataset, before you drive to the summer cottage, so you don't have to wait days/weeks for the backup to be up to date.
- hellbanner 12y ago
  If you built it you'd have 1 customer for sure!
Erwin 12y ago
It's not hardware, but the CrashPlan backup software (supporting Linux, too) has a nice way to "backup to a friend". You just have to "friend" each other on the backup (!) social network and you can select your friend's computer as backup destination and vice versa. While not default, there's an option to not store the encryption key with your account (otherwise there's some escrow going on in case you lose your PC).
Flenser 12y ago
I think Lima might be what you want: https://meetlima.com/ https://meetlima.com/ > If you want to be safe against hard drives and Lima failures, we recommend you to install an extra Lima on your local network or on another location which will replicate your data. — http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203013968-Does-Lima-provide-back-up- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203013968-Does... But you'd have to have a separate Lima for each user at the moment: http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341487-Can-one-Lima-be-used-by-multiple-users- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341487-Can-...
- cromulent 12y ago
  No, it's not what I want. Best answer yet though :) "Once Lima is installed on each of your devices, the memory of each device is replaced by one unique digital memory that contains all of your data." Nope. I want a hard drive that is mirrored in a different physical location on hardware that I own. I want control over the content. I don't want to store data on other people's servers. I don't want another monthly bill. I don't want an agreement with another party in another country.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Flenser 12y ago
    It's possible this is more in line with what you want: http://www.expandrive.com/strongsync http://www.expandrive.com/strongsync Agreed, if you want a HD mirroring that's not something Lima does (at least at the moment) but for data and photos Lima is pretty much exactly what you asked for: You don't have to store data on other people's servers. Buy two limas and two usb drives, install one set in your house and another in your buddies/mothers house. From the kickstarter page[1]: > You can install one Lima in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Limas will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Limas are enough. But with each Lima you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Lima, you can also ask your Limas to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted[2], so your friends will not be able to read it. The other company in this space to watch is http://www.tonido.com/ http://www.tonido.com/ but I don't think their offering is as close a lima to what you want. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-bra... [2] http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341497-How-secure-is-Lima- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341497-How-...
rakoo 12y ago
The software can be provided with Bittorrent Sync: launch, enter some code and you're in a shared space with whoever has the code. I'm currently writing an opensource equivalent. The difficult part will be to come up with a packaged hardware that is simple to install, though, but you can start with friends' computers.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

klinquist 12y ago

I believe this is the rough idea behind https://www.spacemonkey.com/ https://www.spacemonkey.com/

cromulent 12y ago
Similar, but not quite. I want something where I can retrieve it by sneaker net and it is basically under my control.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Seriously? That's a pretty straight forward project. Buy a USB drive, buy a Rasberry Pi, rent a VPS from Amazon or whomever. Export the USB drive as an NFS volume to the local lan, Run a cron job on the Pi that connects to the VPS over SSH and does an rsync. Done. If you want it locally encrypted you'll need an encrypted file system. Error recovery is tricky of course. You can leave a copy of your files in the 'cloud' (depending on your situation could be good or could be bad). And it depends on whether you want it active/active (you can add files on either side) or active/passive (where the passive side is pulling the active side pushing). Should cost about $100 or 80€ in parts per unit (so double that for two units). A bit more for the internet access and a monthly fee for the VPS. If its a lot of data there may be some bandwidth charges as well.

StavrosK 12y ago
You can use attic, although it will need a cheap VPS, it doesn't work with S3: https://attic-backup.org https://attic-backup.org Writeup here: http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
swombat 12y ago
Of course I (and the OP) can build one ourselves... but I want one that's easy to use. Ideally, just plug it in and configure its wifi access, and create some kind of "peer group" for it that my friends can join remotely with their own devices. Then everyone in my peer group gets an encrypted backup of my files, and I get an encrypted backup of theirs. The main difficulty will be making sure this baby has seriously expandable storage. I have terabytes of stuff to back up. So do the people I want to connect to. This thing needs to scale up to 10-20TB min to be useful today.
cromulent 12y ago
Yes, seriously. I understand your suggestion, but that seems to cost the same amount plus some hours of my time. And, the data is on a VPS, which is not under my roof (or a trusted persons roof). And I get another monthly bill. I'm a user, this is what I want :) Edit: Also, it should be easy to load the remote drive first locally with your dataset, before you drive to the summer cottage, so you don't have to wait days/weeks for the backup to be up to date.
hellbanner 12y ago
If you built it you'd have 1 customer for sure!

Erwin 12y ago

It's not hardware, but the CrashPlan backup software (supporting Linux, too) has a nice way to "backup to a friend". You just have to "friend" each other on the backup (!) social network and you can select your friend's computer as backup destination and vice versa. While not default, there's an option to not store the encryption key with your account (otherwise there's some escrow going on in case you lose your PC).

Flenser 12y ago

I think Lima might be what you want: https://meetlima.com/ https://meetlima.com/ > If you want to be safe against hard drives and Lima failures, we recommend you to install an extra Lima on your local network or on another location which will replicate your data. — http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203013968-Does-Lima-provide-back-up- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203013968-Does... But you'd have to have a separate Lima for each user at the moment: http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341487-Can-one-Lima-be-used-by-multiple-users- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341487-Can-...

cromulent 12y ago
No, it's not what I want. Best answer yet though :) "Once Lima is installed on each of your devices, the memory of each device is replaced by one unique digital memory that contains all of your data." Nope. I want a hard drive that is mirrored in a different physical location on hardware that I own. I want control over the content. I don't want to store data on other people's servers. I don't want another monthly bill. I don't want an agreement with another party in another country.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Flenser 12y ago
  It's possible this is more in line with what you want: http://www.expandrive.com/strongsync http://www.expandrive.com/strongsync Agreed, if you want a HD mirroring that's not something Lima does (at least at the moment) but for data and photos Lima is pretty much exactly what you asked for: You don't have to store data on other people's servers. Buy two limas and two usb drives, install one set in your house and another in your buddies/mothers house. From the kickstarter page[1]: > You can install one Lima in your home and one in your office, for example. Your Limas will automatically work together to replicate your content. Two Limas are enough. But with each Lima you buy, your data gets more secure and also faster to access. If some of your friends have Lima, you can also ask your Limas to back up each other's content. Your data is encrypted[2], so your friends will not be able to read it. The other company in this space to watch is http://www.tonido.com/ http://www.tonido.com/ but I don't think their offering is as close a lima to what you want. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-bra... [2] http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341497-How-secure-is-Lima- http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341497-How-...

rakoo 12y ago

The software can be provided with Bittorrent Sync: launch, enter some code and you're in a shared space with whoever has the code. I'm currently writing an opensource equivalent. The difficult part will be to come up with a packaged hardware that is simple to install, though, but you can start with friends' computers.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]