[colug-432] Recommendations for inexpensive and secure cloud storage?

[Scott Merrill]

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On 8/19/14, 6:10 PM, Dan Kaiser wrote:
> I had been trying to set up OwnCloud as my own personal Dropbox 
> platform for self-hosted, backed-up, storage for all of our media 
> and more important files, but now I will need to put that plan on 
> hold.

You could run ownCloud on server at some place like Digital Ocean.  I've
been pleased with Digital Ocean overall.

You could probably run ownCloud on a Platform-as-a-Service solution like
Red Hat's OpenShift (www.openshift.com) for free.  Since ownCloud allows
you to use "external storage", you could tie this ownCloud installation
into any number of back-end storage providers (Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3),
and you could enable the ownCloud encryption feature to encrypt the data
at rest at those back-end services.

Of course, doing either of these negates some of the benefits of
ownCloud, in that the data isn't entirely under your control.

> I have 50 GB each in Dropbox and Box, but we'll need a good deal 
> more than that.  I thought about setting up a box running
> Crashplan at a family member's house to have everything back up
> automatically using their "friend" backup solution, but there are a
> lot of things that could go wrong with that.


In addition to Dropbox and Box, check out spideroak.com.  Same general
idea, except that all data is encrypted using keys you generate and
control.

Another interesting option is BitTorrent Sync:
http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

And yet another alternative: http://sparkleshare.org/

> Does anyone in this group use or recommend a hosted storage 
> platform? I want to ensure we have access to all (or at least
> most) of our digital media and other important files (read: tax
> and financial data, etc.) while we are away.  I'm planning to bring
> along at least one 4TB external drive, but I'd hate to rely on one
> spinning disk for a year without a backup/redundancy plan.

You've identified a number of different kinds of data, and I suspect
that different bits of your data would benefit from different solutions.
 A single gigantic repository of your data is possible, but probably not
time or cost effective.

For live data that you need, a DropBox or SpiderOak or ownCloud
repository is probably a good use. For archival data that you need to
ensure is available but don't need to access with regularity, an Amazon
S3 bucket might be good.  If you can deal with a *really* slow retrieval
time, Amazon Glacier is even more cost-effective for data archiving.

You could of course encrypt all the data before you put it into S3 or
Glacier, if that's important to you.

Portable flash media drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time.
 You could get a handful of 32GB (or larger) USB sticks and populate
them with data.  This works for "hot" data that you need to access
frequently as well as archival data.  You can make multiple redundant
copies pretty easily (as long as you're patient!).

Cheers,
Scott


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