

Ask HN: Online backup without a computer? - salvadors

I'm going to be travelling for about 3 months, and won't be taking my laptop with me. My technology will largely be restricted to a camera with a 4GB SD card, an iPod touch, and a 250GB USB HD. My plan is to dump my photos from the camera to the HD at such times as I get access to a computer, but I don't like that being a SPOF, so I'd really like an online backup too.<p>I can, of course, carry software on the HD that could be installed temporarily on computers I'm using in order to manage this, but I'd like to minimise the amount of hoops I'll need to jump through at each location (i.e. installing Cygwin everywhere to run rsync isn't really an option!)<p>I have my own server that I can upload to, but I'm also open to software that stores data on S3 or wherever (this will hopefully be write once, read never!)<p>Suggestions?<p>(Alternatives also welcome, e.g. "Don't bother with online backup: just carry a couple of extra SD cards and backup to those", but online backup has the added benefit of being more resistant to everything getting stolen / destroyed when I fall into a lake / whatever)
======
gizmo
Why not just use FTP?

Set up your camera to save the photos to in different folders based on date,
then just get some web space, go to ftp://yoursite/ and drag&drop the photos.

It's low tech, but it's almost guaranteed to work from anywhere, and you're
less likely to get kicked out for "hacking" when you don't have a cygwin
terminal open.

~~~
salvadors
I'd rather have something that can work out what I've already uploaded (and
ideally with partial file resume) so that I don't have to keep track of
everything myself. I probably won't always have good enough upload bandwidth
to be able to always catch up in one session, so just organising by date isn't
ideal. But it's not too much hassle to just keep Uploaded/NotUploaded folders
locally and move things when done, so this is probably the fallback position.

What's a good SCP/FTP-over-SSH client for Windows? Filezilla seems to work OK,
but is a little clunky (on the Mac, anyhow. I don't have a windows machine to
hand to test it on)

~~~
webignition
The best SCP/FTP-over-SSH client for Windows I've encountered is WinSCP
(<http://winscp.net/eng/index.php>).

It comes in a standalone install-nothing flavour and lets you choose, when
copying a group of files from A to B, to only copy files that have changed.

I'm not aware of what algorithm is used to determine when a file has changed.
I've always assumed this is based on file modification time so this might not
be clever enough to spot a partially-uploaded file and either re-copy or start
from where it left off.

You can certainly pause file transfers and subsequently resume but only during
a session.

------
uptown
Consider using Dropbox (A YC startup).

<https://www.getdropbox.com/>

You can get 2gb for free, or pay for more if you need it. If you need more
than you're able to pay for, you could have a home PC syncing the stuff to
another location and removing the original to free up the space.

~~~
salvadors
I've played with Dropbox before, so it's an option, although I'd prefer
something with finer granularity of pricing. I'll probably need more than 2GB,
but unlikely to need more than 10, so jumping straight to 50 is quite a leap.

I also got the impression that Dropbox doesn't cope so well with being run
from a different computer every day, and would want to sync all my existing
stored files down onto the computer I happen to be using that day, which isn't
so good. And AIUI I'd need to make double-double-sure I'd uninstalled it from
each when I was done, and notify Dropbox that this machine is no longer active
etc. But I admit I haven't dug too deeply into all that yet.

~~~
jlees
Couldn't you have the dropbox folder as a folder on your removable drive,
removing the need for syncing every time?

------
DenisM
Just buy more SD cards. They are cheap and you can pack a lot of them into the
space taken by HDD. And you won't have to look for a PC with internet.

~~~
lsb
A 4GB card at retail, 5 months ago, was $7. How many pictures do you think
you'll be taking? 16GB should be plenty of space.

~~~
salvadors
Interesting question. I really should have worked that out already :)

The current plan involves being in about 20 countries over the course of just
under 3 months. So let's say 90 days x 50-100 photos per day x 2-3MB per
picture. That gives somewhere in the region of 16GB right there; with backup,
twice that. And that's probably on the low side.

Hmmm. I'm going to need more space (and more upload bandwidth) than I thought!

------
ulysses
I've never set up Cygwin on a USB drive, and then tried to transport it
between computers, but that's the first thing I'd try.

Then you could write a simple script to do an rsync-over-ssh to your server,
and just run it directly from the USB drive.

It would probably be best to test it on at least both Vista and XP systems, to
make sure it works.

I'd use ssh keys, so that you don't have to worry about keystroke logging. You
could also make a user for it on your server side, and lock it down to just
allow the rsync in.

Look into the '--link-dest' option to rsync, this allows you to really easily
do incremental backups, each time you backup your new backup directory has all
the files in it, but any files that haven't changed are hardlinked to the
previous version, so you don't take up much disk space. Really, really cool.

~~~
salvadors
I think the Cygwin approach might be a little too much, but thanks for the
--link-dest pointer: I wasn't aware of that before, and it'll be handy for
other things I'm doing.

------
jlees
If it's just photos, you could possibly use Flickr Pro? It might be tedious
downloading them all later if you lose them, but it's a fairly obvious online
home for photos, especially if you want the world to stumble across them. Just
another option, really.

~~~
salvadors
Heh. I already have a Flickr Pro account that I use actively, and hadn't
thought of that :)

I wouldn't want to pollute my normal stream with the 95% of dross that I'll
doubtless take, but setting the default visibility to private could work well.

ISTR that flickr does some processing of the images as you upload them though,
and don't really like the idea of losing the originals, but perhaps that only
impacts the lower res versions, and the original always stays intact. Must
investigate further...

~~~
jrnkntl
If you got Flickr Pro the originals always stay intact. If you want (don't
think you can considering general upload speeds in internet cafe's) you can
even upload the RAW's and Flickr will keep them available for your at all
times.

------
psadauskas
FileZilla on the USB hard drive (<http://filezilla-project.org/>)

It doesn't need to be installed, you can just run it from the drive, and it
can transfer via FTP or SSH to a cheap slicehost or dreamhost. I even think it
supports syncing directories, so you can just resume where you left off.

------
scumola
<http://www.eye.fi/> and a flickr.com account. The card connects to any open
wi-fi access point and just uploads everything to flickr.com or other online
photo site. When you get back, go through all of your photos and delete the
ones you don't need. Better than lugging around a USB harddrive.

------
jacquesm
I'm assuming that you are assuming (it gets tedious) that that computer you
use to dump your data with to the HD will have network access.

Have a look at this (I just took a peek at it this morning, it's built by
another HN poster):

<https://beta.tarsnap.com/>

~~~
huhtenberg
> will have _good_ network access

You will need a reasonably fast Internet access to use the online backup.
Depending on where you will be traveling, you may run into upstream bandwidth
being severely restricted.

~~~
salvadors
Yeah, that's one of the unknown quantities in all this, and it's one of the
reasons why I'd like something that can remember what's been uploaded already
(and ideally handles partial file transfers etc). Then I can just leave it
running everytime I'm online and have it just pick up where it left off next
time. Then when the connection isn't great I can at least hopefully get
_something_ uploaded, and when I hit good connectivity everything will catch
up.

------
callmeed
I would put them on S3 via any of the FTP clients that support it. Just keep
the installers on the hard drive.

