Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?

Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by cromulent on Saturday September 24, 2016 @04:24AM (#12570040)

A non-cloud off-site backup appliance.

This is what I want (I know there are alternatives, but this is what I want):

A device that I buy, and can plug at least one hard drive in to. I give it some sort of passphrase. I then place it in a friend's house and connect it to their internet connection.

I can then access it remotely from my house. I can easily backup my stuff to it. My backups are encrypted, both over the wire and on the drive.

When my house burns down, I can drive over there and get all my photos and records and stuff, instantly.

I don't pay a monthly fee. I buy the device and then it is mine.

I know I can build this myself. I don't have time. If I could buy this I would.

It would be nice if it was easy to use the other way around, e.g. buy one for your parents and keep it at your house and automate their backups somehow.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by jlengrand on Saturday September 24, 2016 @04:31AM (#12570058)

Hey there,

I know it does not totally answer your request, but you totally can achieve that with Crashplan; and for free. Simply buy a NAS or equivalent, place it at your parents and install Crashplan on it.

It is not as perfect as a totally untied system like you want, but it is free and offsite :).

I am a happy customer of Crashplan for a while but other than that I have no ties there :).

https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by cromulent on Saturday September 24, 2016 @04:39AM (#12570089)

Yeah, I think it is close but not quite. It seems that you can back up to a friend's trusted computer, but it has to be turned on. Plus I don't necessarily want to trust them in that way.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by rakoo on Saturday September 24, 2016 @02:08PM (#12571893)

If you expect your friend to accept having something plugged all the time, I assume you'd be ok with having a similar device at your place running their backup, right ?

In that case, you can buy a NAS for you, have them buy one for them, backup stuff on your own NAS and let the replication from your NAS to their NAS happen in the background.

Bonus: backups/restore/browsing are much faster, and you can more easily accommodate multiple people wanting to backup at the same place -- instead of one device at your place for each of your friend, it's only one at your place to which all your friend's NAS backup to.

I use Synology NAS, not with this setup, but I know they have the software to do exactly this.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by jjp on Saturday September 24, 2016 @04:49AM (#12570129)

Try Synology Hyperdrive. I'd assume that all the other NAS vendors do something similar.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by tibu on Sunday October 02, 2016 @01:48PM (#12623438)

My Synology NAS does exactly this. Besides this it backs up my Google Drive and Dropbox too.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by Tomte on Saturday September 24, 2016 @08:52AM (#12570737)

You could probably do something like that with FreeNAS and ZFS send.

Also, Crashplan has a "backup to friends" feature.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by mynewtb on Saturday September 24, 2016 @06:20AM (#12570332)

Raspberry running an SSH daemon or rsync or attic or whatever?

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by wodenokoto on Monday September 26, 2016 @06:16AM (#12580612)

There's been a few services like this. None have seems to have made it, at least I can't remember any names.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by rm445 on Saturday September 24, 2016 @06:46AM (#12570397)

Product already exists in the form of consumer NAS devices. You don't have to build anything, just turn on remote access.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by chadcmulligan on Saturday September 24, 2016 @06:13AM (#12570318)

You can do this with Time Capsule I believe. Doesn't help for windows or linux of course.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build? by firewalkwithme on Saturday September 24, 2016 @04:43AM (#12570105)

I want exactly the same thing!

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