Show HN: full system backups via Sneakernet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: full system backups via Sneakernet

sneakerbackup.com

45 pointsjacquesc45 comments

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.

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.

A list of supported countries is a must have.

So essentially you are doing what Amazon already offers (http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/), just cheaper (currently) and with a regular schedule?

I hope you have a lot going/planned in the UX part and would love to hear about it :-).

> We just take the data and sync it

An image of the drive? Files on the drive? More data would be helpful.

Do we ask for a particular drive size and you send it?

What if I've got a 2TB drive with TrueCrypt volumes and I just dd it over to the drive you provide? Do you put the entire drive image on Amazon Glacier?

Or are you expecting a readable filesystem?

Glacier...uh; it's horribly expensive for retrievals...?

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...

Shit... you're right. We should have checked that, we'll have to find a better solution (S3 might work but also might be too expensive).

I've actually been researching this recently. The cheapest I found (better than S3) was a machine at http://www.hetzner.de/ loaded with drives.

This also sucks; you have to maintain your own hardware and make the files / blocks redundant. Whilst possible, it's certainly going to add complexity and overheads; RiakCS (http://basho.com/products/riakcs/) springs to mind.

S3 with RRS would be better, but the economics may not work out. However, unlike normal internet based backups, you can't replace corrupted / lost files sneakily, well not until the next backup-drive arrives.

Also, be aware that you'll not be able to de-dupe files across users (this also has issues if you could) as you're encrypted. Also, if the encryption key is different, you won't even be able to do this cross backups...which will suck.

Why don't you keep a drive per customer (in a bank if needs be) and upload it to Glacier for redundancy? Couple it with making a copy of the drive when you drop it in a mail for a customer, and you have two levels of recovery at any given moment, one - instant, another - from Glacier.

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)

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

Exactly, and the OP is getting good feedback.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

Umm, what?

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

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. :)

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.

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).

Just wondering, is lizibot.com from your email a domain from which minviable (from LiziLabs) offers you to receive feedback?

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.

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

It would be nice if you could access the drive you send them online as well, perhaps.

Edit: My bad, they do this too.

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.

I think they are trying to speed up the initial backup phase. Uploading 300 gigs of data is no fun. Once they have the data, it's trivial to make the contents accessible via the web/native interface if that's what the client want.

But this would dillute the focus of the service. It'd become just another Dropbox clone with a minor twist.

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.

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).

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.

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

I've never used Backblaze, but restoring with Crashplan is pretty simple. I can restore my entire user folder as backed up in under an hour. I've done it more than once, and would never consider it lacking.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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?

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).

>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.

Because if you put it somewhere in your home, you are not diversifying the geographic risk.

There is a solid argument to be made with backing up your hard drive and shipping it across the country, or to another continent.

If you get hit by a earthquake or a hurricane, you can be sure you have at least 1 copy of your data safe. It's the same advantage to why you would want to do 'cloud backups'.

Except that this doesn't require huge broadband and tying up your connection for days/weeks.

Sneakernet is actually a pretty common technique used by large companies, but they use tapes instead of hard drives (although I am sure many now use hard drives).

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?

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?

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