[john61]

I have two small servers (plug computer) on two different locations / providers / IP addresses with all my data. They are synced by rsync. That is my own small redundant cloud. Not expensive and quite easy to setup with some Linux knowledge.

[pyre]

I'd be curious to see a write-up of this. What are the details? Since these are plug computers are they just at two residential locations, or are they actually in co-lo? How do your keep your desktop/laptops in sync? Remote mount? also rsync?

[john61]

I have a house and a flat 120 km away from each other. One is the master the other the slave. The master is read/write the slave read only for the clients. They are mounted with sshfs (not ideal with interrupted WiFi connections / reconnect issues, might switch to WebDAV) by the clients Laptops, Desktop, Nokia N900es etc.. They sync with a cron job. Also they test if clients are nearby (Wifi) and rsynces them for backup purposes. The main data is all on the master/slave servers. I sync manually to clients if necessary for offline work(driving by train etc.)

The plug computer is a Sheeva plug. There is a low power WD USB 1 TB drive connected, power consumption in idle is <5 W.

[pyre]

Thanks for replying. I imagine you also have some sort of backup regiment outside of the 'cloud.'

[john61]

Why? Do you think this is insecure?

[pyre]

Well, it's a mirroring technique. Sure you're mirroring to an off-site location, but I'm assuming there is no versioning happening (i.e. snapshots). If a file becomes deleted or corrupted on the master, then that change will propagate to the slave, and you will no longer have the file.

[john61]

Correct, but one can use rdiff-backup http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/. Since I use mercurial for critical files I have some versioning.