[Freedombox-discuss] Leaving the (proprietary) cloud - my roadmap for FB

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 12:47 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 8 October 2010 14:01, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 12:54:34PM +0200, Arthur Lutz wrote
> >>
> >> When I think of the FreedomBox and leaving the cloud, the first thing I
> >> think about migrating is not my email. One of the reasons is that I'm
> quite
> >> dependent on it and don't really want an adjustment period right now for
> >> this tool. When I think about leaving the cloud, I want to migrate the
> least
> >> "critical" services first, so I can start trusting my FB (stability,
> >> security use etc.)
>

I see FreedomBox as a nice drop-in home-server which is designed to be
reachable from the wider internet. It'll run some web-servers, something
like Diaspora... mine will probably handle my e-mail at some point, etc. But
the killer feature for me is always the same: Automated, user-friendly
backups.

So my contribution to the list is:

 * Time-machine/... -> dirvish + https + ...?

With some minor tweaks I've managed to get Dirvish to do fully automated,
opportunistic backups of the family's computers (laptops etc.) that come and
go from my home network, and then I grant access to the backup snapshots
using an SSL+password-protected, publicly visible HTTP server.  This gives
us both backups and access to all our files, all the time, from anywhere.

I've also worked on auto-extracting and sorting media (mp3s etc) from the
backups (using hard-links to save space, like Dirvish), allowing me to build
a central media library without any manual work: just copy files to my
laptop, let them sit for a backup cycle or two and then delete them. :-)

The same idea may apply to other things, such as aggregating bookmarks or
even making your own private version of Google's in-the-cloud web-surfing
history. Extracting your e-mail "social graph" and using for light-weight
personalized spam-filtering could also be very powerful.  You almost
certainly don't share that stuff with 3rd parties, but being able to mine
your own data can be really useful and on a home server, backups are a
useful and elegant way to collect the raw data.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, CEO and janitor of the Beanstalks Project.

http://beanstalks-project.net/  ~  http://bre.klaki.net/
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