I have renamed The Terabyte to Vault 107 after my gaming experience with Fallout 3. And so into the next phase of my scientific madness, I am in the process of getting very chummy with cloud storage.
Obviously there are lots of ways to deal with these new paradigms of computing, but I'm trying to be incrementally logical about it, and get very familiar with one small chunk at a time. So for now the focus is on moving data, reorganizing it, optimizing its form, security and deduplication. With those things in mind, I will be experimenting with my terabyte or so of personal digital data that I have accumulated over the years and lives in various forms at the homestead.
On the back end I've got Amazon and Mosso/Rackspace as my vendors of choice. In the middle I have three intermediaries. They are Nirvanix, JungleDisk and Dropbox although Dropbox is something of a special case. On the front end, my sources, I have about 16 different hard drives, some spinning, some dormant. In addition I have about seven Case Logic folders full of DVDs and CDs. It's a nightmare. I should also add that I have Carbonite in the mix as well. It's backing up some 27-30 GB of my primary home computer. Plus I have photo archives at Picasaweb and Flickr to consider too. Needless to say I also have a family full of iPods some with DRM most without and about 800 CDs. I also have (shudder) about 150 DVD movies, another 100 VHS movies, 30 Hi8 videocassettes and 50 actual four track audio cassettes, some of which are over 20 years old. One includes some of my original DJ'ing. Yowsa.
My ultimate goal, as you might imagine, is to get all of that digital and digitizable material up into a cloud where it can be backed up, secured and made available to me wherever I am on a variety of devices. Chances are, you have a similar problem. At the very least, It would give me a reason to cut down on my insurance premium - because really who cares about cash if you've lost your digital stash? I want to make mine untouchable by disaster. It's a big investment.
Once upon a time, I thought that banks would get into this business which I considered back in 1996 when Windows 95 and Earthlink had basically made FTP available to the general public. When Jaz drives were all the rage, who would want to keep all of that stuff at home - maybe you had the same headache with Jaz as I did. Why not trust your digital assets to something like a bank? Even though we were all saying that 'disk is cheap' it still wasn't cheap enough and bandwidth was very expensive. Now it's all cheap. So let's do it.
What's not so obvious is that the great benefit of my doing this will put me ahead of the curve in the data management component of my day job. In fact, I'll be presenting some professional applications of this at Oracle Open World this fall, with any luck from the selection committee. But by then I will have had some experience with CouchDB and JSON and some other cool things. For now, I'll deal with dumb static data in simple formats and get some idea about what kind of muscle it takes to hump that up and down from clouds.
The first test is going to be of a product I own called Advance File Organizer. So far it has worked like a dream in dealing with the cataloging of every file on every disk. Of course I have been patchy in updating that master catalog. Through JungleDisk, I am able to map what appears to be an ordinary networked drive to an AWS S3 bucket. Once I get about 200-300 GB up into my bucket, I'm going to point AFO at it and see how it works. That will give me searchability in the cloud as if it were just another local volume. I'm next going to by a license of Tree Size Professional because the free version I have doesn't do network drives. And that will get me started.
Stay tuned.
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