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digitalderbs writes:
"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lagg on Monday March 24 2014, @10:10PM
Disclaimer: They gave me 50GB because they liked my testimonial enough to put it on their site. I'm otherwise unaffiliated.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me]
9467 6082 8A35 2E1E 2D6B 76C4 5E9A ED56 076F 9E89
(Score: 2, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday March 25 2014, @12:37AM
client side encryption, twice. I always use ROT 26 the first time, just to throw the bastards off. And then I change all the extensions, like .vxl to .xvl.
And finally, I make sure that I have nothing worth decrypting, so if the Basterds succeed, they are left with my grocery list circa 1998. I recommend Umberto Eco's novel "Foucault's Pendulum", to any seeking the meaning of the obscure encryption reference. Or Cryptonomicon, but Neal is not nearly so good a writer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mojo chan on Tuesday March 25 2014, @04:40AM
SpiderOak is okay if you only have a small amount of data, but if you have lots the cost very quickly ramps up. In that sense it isn't really a backup solution, it is a cloud storage solution for you to keep your working files on. For backup you want something that offers a lot more space, ideally unlimited.
BackBlaze, LiveDrive Backup and many more offer this. I also found Backup Lizard... Sounds iffy but they charge only $3/month for unlimited storage and claim to encrypt.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25 2014, @11:44AM
I've not used SpiderOak, but their business plans claim unlimited storage for no price increase (seems to be based on number of users, not storage). They also say unlimited historical versions, which I find doubtful. That means I can request my data from Sep 14, 2007 at 11:53 am 20 years from now and they won't blink an eye??
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chloride on Tuesday March 25 2014, @08:05AM
I'll admit to being a little confused whenever a vendor is described as "offering client-side encryption". If it's client-side, why is it "offered"? I've had some interest in online backup services, and would never consider one without encryption. But I'd never consider one where any part of the encryption process was provided by the vendor. It's not enough that "I have the keys", if any moving part of the encryption process is provided by the vendor it's a no-go for me. SpiderOak appears to fail that metric.
I'm using encryption on all my data at home, but don't claim to be an encryption expert. I lack the maths to verify any particular algorithm, so I go with what appears to be the community consensus. My local storage is all heavily encrypted (geli/AES-128, plus whatever Linux uses for home directory and whole disk encryption). If I were to sync remotely, I'd encrypt each file individually (probably openssl[1]), and the remote service would only ever see a stream of those encrypted blobs. My encrypted blobs.
[1] Just because I've used it before. Open to other commonly-used OSS suggestions, particularly ones which would be less of a headache when decided which files needed re-syncing.
(Score: 1) by digitalderbs on Tuesday March 25 2014, @08:21AM
Thanks for the note. I very much like SpiderOak's approach (even though they're closed source). However, I had to drop them because their backup archive of my data became corrupt. I was not too impressed with their customer service at the time because they didn't catch the corruption and because I asked for a refund, and they took about 3 months to credit me.