Online storage of documents - how to be calm for your data?

“Backup to the cloud” ... How beautiful it sounds, and how nicely it is offered on the market! I look around, and I am surprised: the whole world is going crazy about the online storage of documents. Dropbox, Wuala, Zumodrive, Box.net - choose, I do not want! Each is different in its own way, each tries to encourage living in its own paradigm, with its client, each assures the safety and integrity of data.

The latter, however, is suggestive. I believe in the sincere desire of the authors of these services to do everything according to the mind, safely and simply beautiful. But I, at the same time, understand how strong the pressure of circumstances can be - the topic of the trial with users who store something is not coming up (for some reason, someone wants a third one and the circle with access to data grows), then, as if for no reason, the cipher is decrypted not only by the owner, the servers of the service are not available in the best way. All this makes me think about whether it makes sense to use something external, by definition, not the most reliable, and whether I want to reassure myself that “I am not such an important bird, no one needs my data.”

Reasons to rummage in my data can come up with a lot (and not all of them are allowed by law). Moreover, over the years of using the service of good, there will be a lot of accumulation there, and at once I don’t even remember which “skeletons” are in which files.

On the other hand, the prices for online data storage services are small, but it is still logical to pay for such services. And this is where the funny question arises - if you want to transfer your data not to an external hard drive, but “to the world”, then why not take up the question of storage device for them yourself?
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No need to go far: let me have 10 GB of data that I want to save. Around us are a lot of VPS hosting with payment according to actual consumption. Take the same scalaxy.ru, and estimate: the monthly cost for the cheapest virtual machine (512 MB of RAM and 16 Xeon cores - they have it at a minimum!) With an external IP, with a system disk of 3 GB, a swap disk of 1 GB and additional disk of 10 GB (here and put your data) will cost us 605 rubles per month. But, pay attention, it is not necessary to “turn” this car all the time. And if the virtual machine is turned off all the time, then the payment goes only for the IP address and for the space on the disks, in our case per month this amount will not be 605, but 137 rubles.

What is interesting to us? Raise the ssh tunnel to the linux server and inside rsync overtake the latest data - this setting is simple and done quickly. Next, it will be logical to configure the firewall, decide whether to encrypt your files on the server, understand whether it is worth storing versions of the files, and whether it is necessary to raise something other than rsync on the server, but this is “taste and color”.

You can enable and disable our VPS, by the way, through the Scalaxy API itself, i.e., the backup script can be in charge of this. The same script can be taught to transfer our current IP to the VPS so that the firewall does not allow anything from other addresses. As a result, the VPS will work exactly as long as it is necessary for backup, and let only its owner use it - at another time, and even to another client, it will simply be unavailable, and even nobody will have a chance to do something bad to it.

And one more note: if our server is not publicly positioned as a repository of personal data, then look for something important on it, perhaps it will not be in the first place - so the paranoid limit can create an account on Dropbox, upload content blended to it , and your personal data is stored on your VPS. Let the enemies, so to speak, search!

The solution I described, of course, does not work out of the box: you need to spend several hours setting it up, as well as writing a backup script. On the other hand, a reliable personal backup is worth the brain-stirring, isn't it?

PS The question of increasing reliability is decided elementary: no one bothers to rent not one, but two, three, as many VPS please as you like, even in the same Scalaxy, even in different parts of the world, from different companies, and organize the described scheme with each of them . This situation personally calms me more than loud (sometimes, unfortunately - purely marketing) words about the “cloudiness” of the hosting and its supposedly increased fault tolerance.