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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002A few months ago I wrote about the pains of backing up large drives. I use a 60GB drive for backups of important files from my main 120 gigger, but I think that I'll outgrow this solution in 6 months. Fortunately I have a pair of 30 giggers lying around...
Looking at the files I am backing up, well over 90% of the space used is static -- changes are rare, additions are infrequent. I need a long-term archiving solution. Burning those files to CD isn't very appealing, I would need about 100 of them (I'd want two copies of everything because I have little faith in CDRs for long-term storage). DVDs would be more practical, I could probably find a Firewire burner to borrow...
What I'd really like is a hybrid online backup service. My upstream bandwidth is about 8KB/s on a good day, doing an initial backup of this data over the Internet would take an insane amount of time. NetFlix has the right idea for moving large quantities of data around: the US Postal Service. Send me a Firewire/USB drive for that initial backup, use the Internet for incrementals. Archive my static data to tape and warehouse it somewhere -- if my system crashes I won't mind it taking some time to retrieve that data, so long as I get it back eventually. Keep my last incremental online and recent ones near-line, that's the stuff that I'll want back quickly.
I've got no idea if such a service could be made affordable for consumers, but it would certainly be more useful than a purely Internet-based backup service.
I've always wondered why client-side spam filters for Windows are designed to work only with certain mail clients. SpamNet and Spam Assasin Pro only work with Outlook 2000+, SpamNix for Eudora 3+, etc... These tools could reach a wider audience if they were built as generic POP/IMAP proxies.
Open Source to the rescue. POPFile is a POP3 proxy that uses "Naive Bayes" for classification, written in Perl but geared for Windows users. Pop3proxy and IMAPAssasin use the Spam Assasin engine.
