Internet based filesystem with no transfer fees
I thought this was a great idea…. rsync.net Okay for 2$ per GB of storage per month (or $24 per year for 1GB of storage) you can have your very own secure online storage drive. For you windows users think of a G: drive or a Z: drive that you could SECURELY connect to from a home machine and a work machine…. If you’re concerned about a catastrophic failure of one of their datacenters, then pay $3.50/GB/month for a more geographically dispersed plan (uses redundant data centers..) The best parts (I think) are this…. ssh encrypted connection to your drive and no transfer fees.
Of course, there have been rumors for some time about a gdrive, or google drive and their unlimited storage, Microsoft is looking to do a live! drive or something along these lines. The biggest problem I can foresee with those approaches is the possibility of Mac/Linux users being locked out. The nice thing about rsync.net is that it is truly accessible from any platform.
From their site….
Data resides on a secure storage network replicated between San Diego and Denver.
– No software installation necessary – access with Internet Explorer, iDisk, FileVault
– Access with open standards (ssh, ftp, WebDAV) and tools (rsync/Unison/scp/sftp)
– Map a drive letter in Windows, browse with the Finder, mount locally in Unix
– A usage overview can be found here.You may build your own tools to access and backup your data in any way you see fit.
Our network is quadruple homed, gigabit speed, connected with IPV4 and IPV6.
There does appear to be a 2GB minimum (so $48 per year is the cheapest you can access this…)
To make things clear – ssh encrypted transfers are one of the “Advanced uses” and on windows would require more setup than their webdav access, but the fact that their concept is flexible with a variety of options means that YOU get to choose how important the encrypted transfer is…
It sounds to me that this would be a really nice solution for backups of your vitally important data. The only concern I have is this (not with rsync.net specifically but with online data storage.) We’ve seen recent viruses threaten to erase local files if they don’t get money, could a service LIKE this (again I’m not singling out rsync.net) be “held hostage” in a similar way… and would some companies offering to store your data sell out your privacy to make a bit more… oh I don’t know – “sure we can do a keyword search on all those word documents so you can serve up ads to them…”. It certainly looks like the dawn of a more convenient era with vast online storage becoming available and (increasingly) more easily accessible, I just wonder how closely we’ll need to be reading the terms to make sure we still own our data.