There’s been a lot going on in the last few days … but this is final-exam week at RIT, and I’ve been working like mad trying to get final projects finished off, cram for final exams and so on.
Regarding my last few posts about social bookmarking, I think I’ve settled on Spurl, after much fiddling with various services. BlinkList has a cool interface, but the geeks over at TipMonkey that recommended it so highly clearly don’t have very many bookmarks, because it’s really lacking in navigation and auto-bookmarking and it’s so-called search feature is completely useless (all they offer is an option to show links by tag name). Spurl, on the other hand, not only stores a snippet of the page, they actually cache the whole page, and their search searches the “categories” (think of these as the folders in your browser bookmarks) as well as the text of descriptions and names and tags! In addition, Spurl will synchronize with del.icio.us and post all the links you “spurl” to delicious as well. I’ll be adding my recently “spurled” links to one of the bars on this site’s front page soon…
If you haven’t disabled autorun on your Windows computer, you really should before something bad happens to you.
In more interesting news mozy is offering 2GB of free storage and a client that lets you backup content from your PC over the internet securely. Backing up your data is a good thing, and backing it up to a different location —in case your PC is stolen or the house burns down … Mozy looks like a very nice service, but 2Gb is a little on the small side for a “backup” service. What I want to know is: does anyone has a piece of software like this client that works over FTP or SSH, so that I can exchange backup space with a friend? The idea is, my friend and I would trade 50GB of space on each other’s secondary hard drives. I have a linux file server, and I back up my data to that from my main PC (although I don’t have a decent automated system in place) and the idea here is not only to automatically do that backup to the linux server … but give me the ability to also do that backup to my friend’s linux file server. Anyway, if anyone knows of a good free software package for this, I’d like to hear about it: I need a windows client to get the data to the local linux sever (but that’s a mapped network drive so no big deal) but I’m consider a linux “cron job” with tar.bz2 and SCP to backup the data from linux-to-linux… The problem is that the reason I don’t do it yet is that it’s just a lot of work to set up and maintain, so I need something easier….
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You might look into Unison. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like a promising solution. And it’s cross-platform.
You might also consider rsync, using a cron job. (Rsync is installed by default on many Linux systems and can usually be added simply enough with your package manager.)
The disadvantage of either of those is that they won’t be stored in compressed form. The advantage is that syncs will occur much faster since only the changed files must be transferred.
I think I’ll try Spurl. I’ve been using SiteBar for a while now (which is only a personal bookmark organizer, not a social bookmarker), but it’s been frustrating me of late and Spurl looks like a more powerful system. Thanks.
Jay, have you seen this? http://www.buddybackup.com/
Unison is actually very interesting. I’ve seen it before, (it’s a bit like FolderShare but more … uhm, ‘NIXy) and these are both actually very cool. The real problem is that they both assume that I have complete control over the backup PC, so there’s no encryption to keep people from looking at the files once they arrive at the backup site. Of course, Unison is open source, so maybe the encryption of the backup could be added on…
BuddyBackup looks to be just the thing, except for the slightly creepy parts where there’s not enough information and it’s all is slightly askew English
... I’m interested in trying this, but unless you can personally recommending it, I think I’d want to put it in a sandbox with a sniffer, considering the lack of information about technical details or their motivation.
This is one of those things where, if it were open source (or even if they openly acknowledged they were going to spam you, as Mozy does) I’d feel much safer about it 
I mean, not for nothing, but a program which you have to leave running all the time, and which connects to the internet and transfers a lot of data … would be a good vehicle for a lot of things … but at least this thing seems to have a real person behind it, even if he is British
Hi,
I am actually the author of BuddyBackup and I was interested in your comments. I was hoping I could just explain a few things.
Firstly, my motivations. You’ve quite rightly spotted that this was intended to be a commerical product hence why I’ve been fairly discreet about how it works. My situation has changed and it’s looking less and less likely that I want to pursue BuddyBackup as a business. In fact I am strongly considering placing the project on SourceForge. In the mean time I decided just to give the software away for free, but to keep the details discreet. The original plan was to sell it directly or possibly licence the technology. I can assure you that the thought of using it for spyware/malware never even entered my head (until now!
).
The central server – (called the “Supernode” in the architechture) really is just a way of letting people find each other. All that is recorded is your local and public IP address and username. This allows other buddies to be able to find you even in extreme situations, e.g. you don’t have a fixed IP address.
The supernode also allows NAT traversal using a technique called “Hole punching”. I didn’t go into detail into this on the website because I was worried the “hole punching” name would confuse and alarm people unnecessarily. In actual fact, it is a similar technique to using UPnP (another NAT traversal protocol). In brief in involves getting your NAT router to permit and forward connections. To clarify: buddies ALLWAYS backup direct to each other using BuddyBackup – there is no routing involved. Indeed, this was one of the key goals of the project: to allow people to backup in a peer-peer fashion so there is not a huge bandwidth hit on my server!
All your files are encrypted using 128 bit AES using the Crypto++ library. This is a well established and verified C++ cryptography library. Because all the data is pre-encrypted, there is no need for connection based encryption such as SSL.
The compression system used is “delta compression” (e.g. zdelta, xdelta). Again this is a third party library.
Finally, yes I am British… in fact I’m English so what does that say about my “slightly askew English”!? (only kidding
)
Hope that this has cleared a few things up. Any comments, especially with regards to making this project open source would be greatly welcomed.
John Wood