
Syncing vs. saving, and the case for a home storage cloud - markbao
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080601-syncing-vs-saving-and-the-case-for-a-home-storage-cloud.html
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smanek
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 ...

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witten
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
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.

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timcederman
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).

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snprbob86
Isn't this what Ray Ozzy is trying to do with Live Mesh?

