
Show HN: full system backups via Sneakernet - jacquesc
https://sneakerbackup.com
======
secure
For my taste, there are too few information on the site. Here are some
questions I am having:

1\. What kind of drive will you send around? Spinning disk? How much capacity?

2\. Is there a special software that customers have to use or could I dd
if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb?

3\. In case a full clone is okay (see question 2), which filesystems are
supported when I want to retrieve a single file online?

Also, here are two observations:

1\. It occurs to me that the time for a full backup is _much_ higher than an
incremental backup. You should probably cover on the page whether you support
incremental backups or not. Having a slow computer for many hours could be a
deal-breaker.

2\. The claim about other backup systems trying to force some kind of
organization scheme on you (can’t quote since the page seems down) is vague. I
have used various backup solutions (bacula, obnam, custom rsync scripts, bup)
and none of them has forced me to do any re-organization of my data.

~~~
jacquesc
Thanks for the great feedback. Yeah, we need a lot more explanation.

Basically the point we need to get across is that you receive a drive and you
can put data on it however you want. We provide a helper for you, but if you
want you can use whatever backup mechanism you'd like. We just take the data
and sync it to Amazon Glacier then resecure the drive.

~~~
larrys
The business concept is fine and there is a market for this but HN is not the
correct market imo.

More importantly you also need to put some contact info on the site and not
use "whois privacy" for your domain name. How is anybody supposed to know who
they are dealing with and why they should trust you?

I mean seriously why in the world would anyone send someone who is (virtually
anonymous) a copy of their hard drive (not that putting contact info
alleviates my fears or can't be faked) but it is certainly a step in the right
direction.

As a social engineering test I wonder what the results would be if some
official looking company sent 100 hard drives out to random small companies
along with software to clone the hard drive and a postage paid envelope
(forgetting mail fraud etc issues or with an overseas address)

~~~
salman89
Show HN isn't about advertising to an HN market. It is about showing HN what
you have built.

~~~
blantonl
Exactly, and the OP is getting good feedback.

~~~
jacquesc
Yep, HN is one of the few places to get honest (read: harsh!) feedback from
smart people to help improve a very early stage product.

Thanks again to everyone!

------
eps
You may want to test our site on iPad. An overlay(?) with a smiley and a
frowney covers 80% of the screen and doesn't go away.

(edit) Random poking and frantic scrolling seems to have done the trick. The
overlay is gone. This is a great idea, _but_ ...

Once you have the encryption in the picture, you'll have people like myself
asking why can't you mail me a drive with a preformatted TrueCrypt container,
let me mount it with a native TC client, change the password, run a backup and
mail it back to you, so that you'd stick this .tc file into the cloud (or
wherever). Repeat on monthly basis, perhaps even with the same drive, so that
I could do a differential backup and be done with it faster.

This is something that I would pay for "from $24/month", some further
conditions apply.

~~~
jacquesc
Whoops, boneheaded mistake on my part. Deploying fix, thanks a ton for the
heads up!

~~~
amorphid
The site is also hard to view in landscape mode on my Android smartphone. I
can't see below the step #s, and scrolling down doesn't seem to work either.

It's a cool idea. Maybe you can partner with (or be acquired by!) BackBlaze.

------
zaidf
I see a link to <http://minviable.com/>. This makes me wonder about the state
of your idea. Is this one of those MVP tests to see demand? Are you a mature
company? Typically these questions matter less but for the data-critical use
cases you seem to offer solutions for, the answers to those questions are very
important.

~~~
jacquesc
Yup, we did that on purpose. This is just a "Show HN" idea that we're
presenting at <http://AngelHack.com> this weekend.

Like a Kickstarter project, it's a proof of concept that could turn into a
real thing if people are willing to pay for it.

It's not as apparent as it should be, we'll make those changes today.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
marcamillion
That minviable concept looks familiar....I wonder where I have seen that
before _cough_ 5KMVP _cough_ :)

~~~
jacquesc
Umm, what?

5kmvp = 0 google search results: <https://www.google.com/search?q=5kvmp>

~~~
marcamillion
Take it easy there tiger...you got a typo in your query:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=5kmvp>

Either way...point is moot. Competition is always healthy....plus I like your
designs. :)

~~~
jacquesc
haha, ok my bad. Haven't slept in a while (AngelHack)

Your site looks cool. Hadn't seen it before but its a solid concept. I had
heard of Obie's one though (3-2-1 launch) so I definitely didn't think our
minviable consulting concept was unique.

~~~
marcamillion
Never heard of 3-2-1 launch before...thanks for the heads-up.

Yeh, I know it's not unique.

I guess it's cool to see competition (it's another form of validation).

------
scottharveyco
This looks like an interesting idea but I get the feeling there isn't a
business behind it yet and they are just seeing if people are interested at
this stage.

In my opinion this would be great a service if they provided online backups as
well similar to Dropbox.

I can't seem to find any information about what countries they will be service
either.

~~~
jacquesc
Yep, we launched this at AngelHack this weekend. Would love feedback on the
approach from the HN community to find out if this is a viable product.

------
mikezupan
I use backblaze now who gives you free recoveries (via downloading) if you
need it or you can pay to get a drive shipped to you (I forget the pricing on
it.)

Why should I use you over paying $5 a month for backblaze? From what I can
tell you basically do the same thing for almost 5x the cost.

~~~
jacquesc
Yeah, the physical component has its upsides and downsides. The costs and
margins are high for sure. The big advantages are a full backup of your drive.
Try restoring your backblaze backup sometime, it won't be easy. Having tried
Backblaze, Crashplan, and Carbonite, I've found I stick with external drive
cloning (from the people we've interviewed so far, I'm definitely not alone).

~~~
gsibble
Ehhhh.....I use a 1TB time machine with my Mac. And backblaze. I'm covered
under most imaginable circumstances and it's much cheaper and automatic than
doing drive cloning.

Neat idea though.

~~~
ukd1
Same for me to, but just upgraded the drive to 3TB (it's really easy). Works
really well.

------
ruswick
I just don't get it. First, the ideology behind the service seems to be
predicated on a straw man: few people think that cloud backup services are
insecure, untrustworthy or otherwise worrisome. Moreover, the physical aspect
seems to be a gimmick intended to demonstrate the philosophy of the service:
this will be an exact replica of what you put on the drive. The results are
the same, though, as the ultimate goal is to expose the data via a web service
(with the option to receive a physical copy as well).

Moreover, there is a greater requisite time investment to use a service like
this, insofar as one has to perpetually move the data to the drive, then take
it to the post office. There is also the added cost of supplying a physical
entity, which clearly translates to an inordinately high monthly charge that
will be indefensible for most. It's a lot of work and a lot of money for a
utility of debatable value.

~~~
superuser2
You must not live in a house with 512kbps upstream.

Doing a full system backup to, say, S3 would take literally weeks. And my
cable connection's downstream bandwidth is so small it's unusable while
uploading (20mbps otherwise). I physically cannot backup my hard drive to the
cloud over the Internet; all I have is an external hdd in the same room. I
would love the offsite storage capability of a service like this.

------
mromanuk
"We've tried them all, and found nothing replaces a good old fashioned
external hard drive as a backup tool. Online backup services try to "analyze"
your data, reorganize it, and sometimes make mistakes."

This doesn't make any sense. Our online backup based on a rsync, makes a copy
of the information that you point it to, and save it to a remote location.

What kind of "magic" do they use? They don't resolve the problem of doing the
backup yourself...either.

------
marcamillion
I like this idea, but like some of the others are saying, this raises too many
questions.

Where does my drive go? What is a "secure location"? Who will have access to
all my data? Who are you? Why should I trust you?

This definitely looks MVPish, and the idea is VERY intriguing....but I need
more peace of mind before I dump all my data on a hard drive that arrived in
the mail.

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jvandenbroeck
I would work more on the value proposition; Why would I send the drive back if
I can just put it somewhere in my home? I don't think bandwidth and processor
power are huge constraints these days?

~~~
jacquesc
Thanks for the feedback.

Upload speeds are actually not great for most people (even with Comcast).

Trying many backup solutions, it's frequent to see it chugging 20-80% of my
CPU. For anyone doing audio, video, or compilations frequently, I'd imagine
they would appreciate the extra speed on their computer.

I personally do superduper backups every 2 weeks on my calendar and was really
wanting to have a service that both reminded me and stored my data offsite
(for long term, reliable backup).

~~~
dublinben
>For anyone doing audio, video, or compilations frequently, I'd imagine they
would appreciate the extra speed on their computer.

I think anyone like this should already have a NAS for local backups. That is
the proper device to run cloud backup software on, not your workstation.

------
blantonl
Jacque, interesting concept. I'm curious, is this a simple arbitrage
opportunity competing physical shipping rates to bandwidth costs?

What happens when bandwidth costs decrease over time?

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eapen
Do you verify the backed up data is intact when you receive it and a giant
magnet at the mail carrier didn't destroy data?

