
Sustaining git-annex development - zrail
https://campaign.joeyh.name
======
rsync
We (rsync.net) are supporting git-annex by offering all git-annex users a
heavily discounted rsync.net account.

This was announced a few days ago, but not on HN in any way:

[http://rsync.net/products/git-annex-
pricing.html](http://rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html)

We've been explicitly supporting git-annex on our platform since our friend
Jason Scott first showed it to us[1] and we will be contributing to the new
campaign.

[1]
[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3625](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3625)

~~~
rb2k_
That's nice :)

And just so people know without having to check the site:

> git-annex users may sign up for our full featured offsite filesystem at a
> rate of 10 cents per GB, per month. An annual payment is required, and the
> minimum account size is 50 GB. There are no usage/bandwidth charges, no
> signup fee, and no contract to sign.

~~~
mjn
Wow, that looks great. With the discount it matches S3's storage pricing, but
without bandwidth charges, with a more convenient interface (an ssh-reachable
regular filesystem), and full-service support. Plus an interesting attempt at
a "warrant canary":
[http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt](http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt)

~~~
zoul
That canary thing is an interesting trick, previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702247).
(Four years ago!)

~~~
rsync
We've been operating the warrant canary since early 2006.

------
zellyn
For those of you wondering whether this is worth supporting, the answer is
Yes.

I work with a lot of smart engineers, and periodically ask them what they do
for personal backup of images, video, etc. I don't think I've yet talked to
someone who was satisfied with their system.

Git annex (with the assistant) brings me closer to my ideal system than I've
been before: a drive at home, one in my desk drawer at work for fire-proof
backups, easy automatic shuttling of data between them using my phone or USB
sticks, and pluggable cloud storage if I decide I want it.

Oh, and a friendly, responsive and excellent developer behind it, developing
software in a cabin, in the woods. :-)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster
recovery.

Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local
backup option. Other backup providers are easily found.

This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of
supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still
struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's
not really the git-annex market, either.

~~~
asdfs
Can you use Time Machine to shuttle data via a USB stick? How well does it
work when you have more than two drives that you want to keep mostly
synchronized?

~~~
semanticist
Time Machine does the one thing it does really well, which is incremental,
local (or network-local) backups and easy restores.

It's not for snapshotting or mirroring. I used to use CarbonCopyCloner to
clone my boot drive to an external USB drive every morning at ~4am, so if the
internal drive on my iMac died I had an immediate bootable replacement.

(And when the internal drive DID die, I just rebooted the machine and took
nearly a year to get around to replacing the internal drive!)

------
M4v3R
The best part of git-annex assistant is that the developer managed to deliver,
or even over-deliver what he was pitching in Kickstarter campaign. There
wasn't a single week in the whole year where he didn't do some real work on
the project. You can check his development blog [1] for details.

[1] [http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/](http://git-
annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/)

------
malandrew

        "Git-annex now auto-syncing photos from my android phone 
        to a Tor hidden SSH service I control (via 
        @guardianproject's Orbot) #prismbreak"
    

Interesting. I love to see how that is all set up. I'm wondering if that can
be done with a Drobo. If not, what is required to get a mini-server set up
that connects to Drobo over iscsi.

------
navs
I donated and I don't often donate (though I really should). It's not just how
awesome the software is that compels me but his dedication to his work and his
frugal lifestyle that leaves me wanting to support this guy with all his
projects.

------
jlgreco
His personal finances are really impressive. Selling his fulltime dedication
for 12k/year...

~~~
jsnell
His arrangements are interesting, to say the least, see
[http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/](http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/) . The whole
thing is worth a read, but here's a sample:

> So the whole house runs on 12 volt DC power to avoid the overhead of an
> inverter; my laptop is powered through a succession of cheap vehicle power
> adapters, and my home server runs on 5 volt power provided by a USB adapter.

~~~
icebraining
There's also his notes to a caretaker:
[http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/](http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/)

------
aw3c2
Blimey,
[https://campaign.joeyh.name/blog/initial_goal_reached_in_sev...](https://campaign.joeyh.name/blog/initial_goal_reached_in_seven_hours/)

Congratulations!

------
zeckalpha
How does git-annex compare to bittorrent-sync?

(I'm a big fan of Joey's other work, so I bet this is top notch, there just
seems to be more momentum behind bittorrent-sync.)

~~~
computer
bittorrent-sync is closed source.

~~~
zeckalpha
I can't believe I missed that. Thanks!

------
gnuvince
Can anyone give me an example of their usage of git-annex? The project looks
interesting, but the most immediate usage I see would be to add big files
(e.g. a database dump, PDF documentation, etc.) to a git repository. What else
do people use it for?

~~~
warp
I use it to manage my "archive" folder, which contains large binary files
which rarely change. This includes music, some tv series, operating system
.iso images, backups of retired computers, etc..

The great thing about git annex is that each clone of the repository has the
entire tree structure of the repository, but by default has none of the data.
So if I'm going on a trip I can just cd into the right folder on my laptop and
type "git annex get ." or "git annex get Windows*.iso". Being able to tab-
complete all the files in the annex even though you don't have a copy of most
of them makes it very convenient.

The numcopies constraints also help enforce redundancy on the data. I could
use raid to have local redundancy, but that only protects against a harddisk
crashing. If I have four repositories in different physical locations and set
numcopies to three, then git annex helps make sure there are always enough
copies of a file (in three different physical locations), so I won't lose data
even if my house burns down.

------
XorNot
I can't remember why I didn't switch to git-annex from Unison, although it did
put me onto bup (which still doesn't quite do what I want either).

I think my biggest problem was by and large I want a versioning sync tool, and
worry a lot less about managing what's on my devices.

~~~
warp
I think you can automate most or all of that with the git annex assistant now
(and I think most of its functionality is exposed as commandline commands as
well, so you don't have to use the GUI if you don't want to).

------
mkilling
Is there a German cloud storage provider that I can use as a git annex remote?

