C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage
online.net
online.net
It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French call their bytes "octets" -- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps variant of theirs or something.
It claims lot of guaranties for your data (99,999999999% durability).
It claims to be secure against all natural and human destruction, despite being located in only one datacenter, 25 meters under the ground, in Paris, which means it could be subject to floods (directly or indirectly).
It claims to be able to handle formats that don't exist yet (for example, LTO-1 to LTO-10, the most recent version of the media being LTO-7).
It claims (with a footnote) to be able to handle "Secret Défense" data, which is extremely dubious. "Secret Défense" is the second most restricted classification in France. It's for highly sensitive information. Companies dealing with "Secret Défense" have to put many security measures in place (proper access control, separated networks, personnel habitation by the government, physical protection, tracking of every copy of every documents...) and are regularly audited by the government. The penalties for messing with that kind of data are pretty harsh, you could spend several years in prison if you publish an SD or just a CD (Confidentiel Défense) document, even accidentally.
Even if it's clearly targeting backup of state related data, it doesn't seem to have been audited by the ANSSI (french National Agency for Computer Security).
What is weird is that Online is a well established company (the parent company, Iliad is 4 billions euros in revenue).
Regarding the LTO format, well LTO-10 seems to exist from what Google tells me (but I am no expert there to be honest ;)
As for the Secret Defense certification, this is ongoing, and, as you stated, we are part of a larger group which already have lots of relation with institutions like ANSSI but we (Online) have also been working with them to be certified in the coming months, of course this is a long and tedious process (as every certification is sic), but we are working on it every day and we see no reason we could not get to the end of it, we have a complete team of guys working on completing all the certifications displayed on the website and we are working with all our teams to get things done right for this.
The whole C14 infrastructure itself has been carefully designed from the beginning with people knowing all the certifications requirements to make sure nothing could get in the way to pass the certifications for it.
Hope this clears a bit your worries,
Mik (Online.net network)
So, only one location.
If you're really concerned about possibilities like that, you should be storing your data redundantly such that it's unlikely that all the locations would be on the same side of a war. France is a good choice for one location; now choose one non-NATO superpower (China?) and one unaligned nation (Brazil? India? Egypt?).
You want to be reasonably certain that at least one location would be either neutral or the victor in any war. Only then can you say you're as close to 'no military risk' as you can get.
My only suggestion is that you have a native English speaker proofread the text on your website. There are a few grammatical and translation errors which make the service seem less professional.
So, for anything long-term, I always recommend going with an established company with a track record for innovation. I don't know these people but they've been hosting since 1999. That means they showed up during a hard time [1] for IT then lasted and improved until 2016. I don't know if they're VC-backed or the quality of their product. Looks innovative, though, for a 90's era company. So, altogether a nice, first impression without the sell-out risk common among storage providers that show up on HN a lot.
Note: One can still use VC-backed providers so long as they're just one among many you use. That way you yourself can exit when they do without threat to operations.
How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...
Each of the drives in a Vault has a standard Linux file system,
ext4, on it. This is where the shards are stored. There are
fancier file systems out there, but we don’t need them for
Vaults. All that is needed is a way to write files to disk, and
read them back. Ext4 is good at handling power failure on a
single drive cleanly, without losing any files. It’s also good at
storing lots of files on a single drive, and providing efficient
access to them.
Diagnose and repair file system problems with JFS and ext4 and debug
other system problems
We upgraded the Linux 64-bit OS from Debian 4 to Debian 5, but we
no longer use JFS as the file system. We selected JFS years ago
for its ability to accommodate large volumes and low CPU usage,
and it worked well. However, ext4 has since matured in both
reliability and performance, and we realized that with a little
additional effort we could get all the benefits and live within
the unfortunate 16 terabyte volume limitation of ext4. One of the
required changes to work around ext4’s constraints was to add
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) above the RAID 6 but below the file
system. In our particular application (which features more writes
than reads), ext4’s performance was a clear winner over ext3,
JFS, and XFS.Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.
The use of standards (rsync, sftp, etc...) makes C14 very attractive.
I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use, but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.
Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that have subsequently been removed locally.
note that you can use many other clients like for example "Arq Backup" or "acd_cli" ( https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli ) to transfer files to Amazon Cloud Drive.
I use rclone (http://rclone.org/) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out.
Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.
(unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)
The REST API is dodgy at the best of times. About 1 in 4 requests fail with random errors (Internal Server Error, Timeout, TooManyRequests, Temporarily Unavailable, etc). The API has an aggressive authentication scheme that requires re-auth every 5 minutes or so. Detecting when re-auth is needed is done by waiting for an Unauthorized error on any request. At least, that's what the spec says. What actually happens is that it returns 401 sometimes, and other times it returns a generic 4xx or 5xx class error with the error's message mentioning that the auth token has expired (sometimes the error message even says 401 Unauthorized, even though the actual error code isn't 401).
Upload speed is quite bad, in part due to the constant errors requiring re-tries and backoff, but mostly because the total response round-trip time is slow. This is particularly cumbersome for many small uploads.
Recently I've been getting waves of TooManyRequests errors, where it will only return TooManyRequests for a day, or even a whole week, making the service unavailable to me (currently in contact with them to see if this can get fixed).
So in other words, I've been using the service for about 5 months and managed to upload only ~1TB of data to the drive (on a 20Mb/s up line). From what I hear the official client suffers similar issues in terms of sync-ing speed.
For $60/yr and no real alternative for me, I feel I'm getting what I pay for. I just wish the API wouldn't completely die for days on end.
Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from, but would like to keep just in case.
(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)
and upload and download are both free, operations (archiving/unarchiving?, et al) are not
Unless they changed it in the space of 16 minutes, I think you might of wanted to give a closer look for making your tl;dr
Only Backblaze had unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month, but I wanted to upload multiple terabytes from a server and they only allowed uploading stuff through their custom, closed-source client.
I didn't have enough time to get my backup service off the ground, but prices have been getting significantly better since then (this was two or three years ago). Dropbox, Google Drive and others are now nearly reasonable and Amazon is lagging behind a bit. I'm still waiting for another price cut, and C14 seems to be doing it. Backblaze B2 is also interesting, but it has other issues again.
This is exactly what I do for personal files that I upload to S3/Glacier for archival purposes -- they are GPG encrypted before ever being transmitted.
You have the option with Backblaze to add an additional layer of privacy via a user-selected passphrase. This passphrase will be used to encrypt your private key. This passphrase is your responsibility to remember and safeguard. This is important: if you forget or lose this passphrase there is no way that anyone, including Backblaze, can decrypt, and thus restore, your data. When you choose to add your own passphrase there is no “forgot passphrase” mechanism as Backblaze does not know your passphrase.
Can anyone compare the advantages of C14 to, say, S4 by Least Authority? I kind of like not having to trust my service providers for security when encryption does the job well enough.
So far it reads as secure 'because we say it is secure'? I find the whole idea of putting your data on hardware other control and still consider it 'secure' a bit strange. Though that might be just my twisted mind.
Also note they charge for internal traffic (and im not sure if you can measure these yourself to make sure the invoice is correct.):
"An operation is an action between your temporary safe-deposit box and C14 infrastructure: Archiving, Unarchiving, Destruction or Verification. Transactions are billed according to the volume of data to be processed at a price of € 0.01 / GB"
Do your math before simply signing up, my penny.
Mik (Online.net staff)
What's with the downvotes?
Here: "A file contains a sequence of bytes. Any file on your computer can be uploaded to B2 and stored in a Cloud Storage, as long as it's not too big. Files can range in size from 0 bytes to 5 billion bytes. "
EDIT: Actually it's in progress: https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456
EDIT2: It is actually already implemented in v1.30!
If so, what kind of verification is it used for?
In any case, thanks for responding here!
Thanks again for the info!
Also, can I use this with duplicity?
Edit: this seems to be it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11969786
For Glacier I believe the download is not free? You need pay for the retrieval of stored data.
Or, maybe the service is 4.66 times as good as Amazon S3?
Or, the 14th letter of the alphabet is N. If we swap that for 14 we get "CN", which is the top-level domain for China, which is most certainly not in France.
The conspiracy theory possibilities are endless! ;)
I wonder what the details of the SLA are. I can't find them on the page.
There is no cloud, only other person's computers.
Another page, the specs, does not seem to override my scrolling, so that feels fantastic indeed but it's probably not what you mean.
But here we actually want the upload rate, so it would take even longer.