Articles tagged with Strongspace

So here I am at work, I’ve forgotten my Ipod again (or just haven’t charged it); and I’m sitting here unhappy that I can’t listen to that Foo Fighters track once more.

I’m sure a lot of people have been in this situation, you’ve got a work machine and a home machine and all your stuff is available but only at home and you’re really kicking yourself for not being able to access that data in your lunchbreak. Come on, this is the 21st century and all.

Strongspace

At the beginning of this year Joyent were running one of their deals ‘The Mixed Grill’ plan, that basically offered you a 30GB Shared Server and 25GB secure online storage with StrongSpace for a one-off fee of $499. Well it was the beginning of the month and me being a geek I opted for it thinking it’d take the pain out of monthly fees, also I’m a fan of StrongSpace.

Thankfully this has paid off big time, you cannot imagine how much of a bonus having a development server permanently available to test things out on is; it’s helped me build some FaceBook Apps , practice my PHP code and learn a lot more about Apache.

On top of that the bonus of having 25GB of storage for the lifetime of StrongSpace is such a big bonus, I’ve managed to upload all my important stuff from my personal laptop; development code, etc, up to the service and so far it’s been excellent. I still backup occasionally to DVD but the weight off your mind is titanic!

Music

So with my important stuff on StrongSpace, what do I do about my music ?

Well I’ve looked at a couple of options, Amazon S3 + EC2 may be a choice for future web app hosting. But the one which stands out the most and gives me the ability to stream music from my online account is MediaMax .

You get 25GB upload storage with the free account with a download limit per month of 1GB, sounds good enough for streaming.

With my iTunes collection rolling in at 12GB, 25GB sounds fine so I’ll start uploading that as soon as I can.

My calculations have the total upload of 8,000,000kb with 45kb per second => will take 46 hours to upload so this might take some time. But if I stagger things and just leave stuff on for the initial upload it should take that extra burden off my mind.

Oh no! Legal Blackwater!

However, herein lies a problem; In Japan recently a court ruled that it was illegal to store music files online, also looking more closely at MediaMax and it seems that they’re in a little bit of internal turmoil as they’re switching the technology over to handle new users, so ftp’ing your files has been taken off; real shame.

I don’t know quite how to handle this, do I put my music online in the hope I can access it and that the service doesn’t cut out; and more importantly I don’t get sued?

I dunno, I like Amazon’s policy with regards to the S3 system (they don’t want to know what you store, just how much you use).

All a pretty gray area with regards to online copyrighted music.

So unfortunately till then I think I’ll have to stave off the uploading.

Real shame for the mp3 side, but top dog with my important work.

One thing you can never plan too well is the eventual loss of data from your primary machine, aka your laptop.

Via Terminal

So realising events from the past I cobbled together some RSYNC commands to backup my laptop’s most important files over to Strongspace.

To use them, you’ll need to create a .ssh directory in your strongspace account (use an SFTP program to do this) and create a .pub public key file and put it on your remote server (strongspace) to upload to it.

Create a key by running,

ssh-keygen -t dsa

This will create a id_dsa.pub file, upload this to your strongspace .ssh/ directory and rename it as authorized_keys without the extension.

Once done you’ll be able to run these thru to your remote storage center in the terminal window seamlessly (more so if you don’t set a password for your key files).

For now though, here’s the code, replace ‘joe’ with your strongspace username

rsync -azvCL —exclude=.DS_Store —progress ~/strongspace/ joe@joe.strongspace.com:/home/joe/strongspace/

rsync -azvCL —exclude=.DS_Store —progress ~/ruby/ joe@joe.strongspace.com:/home/joe/ruby/

(note the — is really two minus signs together so don’t let the css fool you into thinking its one -)

How it works is that in my user root dir I have two directories, one called strongspace containing all my documents and one called ruby containing all my ruby projects.

Be aware that any files you delete on your laptop won’t be deleted on the remote site so things might get messy on the remote after a while, but at least you won’t lose anything.