I signed up for hubiC a while back with the intention of using their touted OpenStack compatibility with Duplicity for encrypted backups (using the Swift backend) - only to discover they have placed their own authentication mechanism on top of OpenStack, breaking compatibility with all OpenStack clients. The only solutions available seem to be running a proxy between your client and hubiC.

It seems that since duplicity v0.7.01 [1] (2015/01/11) it has native support for hubic [2]. Will definitely check it out.

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/CHANGELOG

[2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/duplicity.1.html#sect17

OVH like to dick around with the kernels on their VPS and dedicated servers. You can work around it but I really wish they didn't do this.

On dedicated servers at least you don't need to work around it. You can install vanilla version of your chosen distribution straight from their panel.

> The only solutions available seem to be running a proxy between your client and hubiC.

Actually hubiC doesn't want you to use its API unless you're a developer, which means you must pass the steps necessary to "create an application", after which you will be able to use all API calls. It's burdensome but doable.

I asked for a key, and was given one instantly... used it with hubic to openstack gateway[1] and works very well

https://github.com/oderwat/hubic2swiftgate

Of course it's easy for you because you understand what a client id and a client secret are, and you know why they differ from your username and password. I'm talking about the average Joe that barely knows what a URL is, a redirect URL even less. You know what openstack means, and you know what a gateway is and can run one.

hubiC makes it astonishingly hard for someone to create an app where a user just puts your account username and password and starts using it. If I was negative I'd say it's a scheme to prevent people actually filling their whole quota, because the only simple way they can do it is through the web ui or through the official syncing app.

Since it took a while to find out how to set this up using duplicity to backup the home directory under Ubuntu Linux, here is how I got this to work. Maybe this can be of help for somebody: https://gist.github.com/molobrakos/ff1620ce6031c99f120b

Thanks for the heads up. I was about to sign up for the same reason.

Have you found a better alternative for duplicity backups?

I would stay away from OVH until they fix their billing system. At least on the server side, you have to log in and pay an invoice by PayPal each month. And if you forget, they delete the server without further warning.

Love the services, but the billing system must cost them a huge amount of customers - both customers that find it too time consuming, or customers that forget and are forcibly ejected!

This is out of date information, they introduced auto renew for OVH and Kimsufi sometime toward the end of last year. Both my machines use it.

If they have now introduced it, that's great. I was never offered it; perhaps it varies by region (us/fr/ie). I suggest making sure that you get automatic renewal before signing up for any services. (And then be sure that your credit card doesn't expire!)

They send you an email when you have: 30 days, 2 weeks, 1 week, and 3 days left. Plenty of reminders for me.

Personally, I don't want a sequence of emails; I want automatic billing.

Maybe someone from Stripe can persuade OVH that PayPal is not the best way to process payments (please?)

I'm paying with PayPal automatically ... I get an invoice and a few days later they charge my card through PayPal.

The system could definitely do with an overhaul though the wording in some places was very confusing.

While paypal is not the best, it does have automatic payment support, so...

Paypal is pretty great for most people outside America where credit cards are, luckily, not the norm.

Whaat? I've had nothing but bad experiences with PayPal, and to top it off, the only actual payment method with them seems to be credit card anyways. Also, typically when using credit or debit card with European merchants, there's extra security in the form of OTP list provided by the issuer, checked during the transaction process. I understand this is not (always?) mandatory and the merchant may be storing CC numbers irresponsibly, but the direction seems to be right. What are the possible upsides of PayPal?

I've been funding my Paypal account through bank transfers for as long as I can remember now. It is not linked directly to my debit card/bank account. This makes it impossible for any credit card fraud to happen, or for me to lose any money if any of my online accounts are breached.

It also does not depend on me having a credit card. Which I do not, because I do not require one and having one would add a fee to my account.

The best solution is iDeal, but sadly that is a national thing.

As someone outside America, I disagree; virtual credit cards, offered by our banks, are much better than Paypal.

I'm not aware of my bank offering this. I am in the Netherlands.

I'm not from NL, but I've heard VISA offers the service: https://www.3vcard.nl/

It's funny to think of cards being perceived as an American thing; I always saw the U.S. as relatively cash-oriented compared to other places. In Scandinavia you don't even buy a €3 coffee or €5 kebab without pulling out your card (the same is true in South Korea, and increasingly in Japan).

Parent said credit cards; Scandinavia mostly uses debit, AFAIK, and they usually can't be used online.

At least here (Denmark) using cards online is common. The typical card that nearly everyone has is a Dankort/Visa cobranded card, which works as a Dankort when run by Danish merchants, and a Visa when run by foreign merchants, and can be charged online in either mode. I gather something similar is common in Sweden.

Debit cards are common, credit cards not so much.

I got stung real bad by ovh when they advertised kimsufi servers they didn't have, then failed to communicate timescales, eventually delivering about 2 months late. That box wasn't for anything important, but it made me not trust thier other services.

They stopped taking standing orders in the UK which means, like you, I now have to login and pay every month.

Last time this was posted, several people suggested they strongly cap upload speed to something silly like 200kb/s so it would take years to actually use that "10tb"

i have been uploading a back up to them for the last, nearly, 20ish hours at near enough my full upload speed of 68Mbits/s... so, i cant see any caps yet... I did pay for the 10TB package too...

That seems to be through the web interface, I've seen screenshots of people pushing more than 10MB/s.

I don't have a fat enough pipe to confirm or deny 10 MB/s but here's my experiment uploading a few RAW photo files (~25 MB each). Seems good enough. I haven't tried download speed though. For what it is worth, downloading files from the web interface in Microsoft OneDrive (previously SkyDrive) is ridiculously slow.

I think there is a distinction to be made between syncing (Dropbox, Google Drive, Barracuda Copy, Microsoft OneDrive and so on) and back ups. The providers try to blur the lines with features like trash can (where files go when you delete and you have to delete again), file history so you can go to a previous version of a file, selective synchronization so you can only download files you need and so on. However, I'd say the distinction still remains because we need to measure backups by how easily and quickly we can recover in case of a disaster.

At 10 TB, I'd imagine OP falls in the latter category. If they limited us to 200 kbps unless we paid extra, that'd be a big fail.

That being said, I doubt they'd do that. Here's a screenshot of me reaching 37 mbps peak upload:

https://i.imgur.com/1tSr48U.png

Edit: I take it back. Upload from the web interface stalled. https://i.imgur.com/UC8qWA4.png

I don't know why the upload stalled but I went back to upload the rest of the files and it worked. I tried downloading and it was a little under 2 mbps which isn't that great.

hubiC had a great campaign a while ago which made me try it out. their client crashed and produced dialog boxes every time my notebook was offline or didn't get an IP address fast enough.

My experience is about half a year old now but back then it has been a horrible piece of engineering not only from the client but also from their website (EULA in french only).

Personally, I felt it was not good value for money but rather a cheap service that I wouldn't want to trust with my data let alone backups.

I don't have the greatest of impressions of OVH either, though I didn't have any problems during my short period trying out hubiC.

That said, I'd rather have my backups on many cheap providers than on a single expensive one. There are inherent risks in relying on a single company.

But, why? The upload time / cost must be enormous (on my home DSL it would take all year to upload. And the value of online remote storage is seriously limited by the access time.

This is like the fragmented 20TB hard disk (considers the magnetic upper limit) - even if you had a disk that size the seek times would mean months to take the data off.

It's nice to have but the uplift needs to occur throughout the whole network for there to be benefit.

Well, surprisingly, not everyone has your home DSL connection.

We're far from the country with the fastest connections, but even here you can get one where it would only take 20 days to upload, and less than a day to download everything, for less than $30/month (and that includes cable TV and a landline with free calls).

Are you serious or trolling?

The vast majority of us can benefit from this. If not your home computers, then your VPSs or something like that.

Serious if not rigorous.

Someone downthread quoted 10 days at 100Mbps is fine - when that's two years at 1Mbps a common end to end throughput.

Cloud computing is a massive game changer, but while the economics have changed, the laws of physics and calculus of reliability has not - at some point I cannot imagine not saying "my really important data is, once all is said and done, mirrored across those two physical hard disks in this physical location. Preferably encrypted with this key."

Moving across the network to retrieve from disk is always the slowest part of an operation. This is unlikely to stop being true. And until the entire internet thinks nothing of 10TB as a transfer then storing that much "somewhere" is always going to be far far less reliable than planning a storage stack taking into account topology, relevance, usage and risk.

We used to worry about fitting things into 1KB, not a word doc takes 1MB, neither of which trouble any modern network.

But to me, and I may be wrong, we are in the 1KB internet while these guys are offering cloud storage for 1MB word docs.

To stress your point, hubiC supports the OpenStack API to access your storage: https://api.hubic.com/

> This is like the fragmented 20TB hard disk (considers the magnetic upper limit) - even if you had a disk that size the seek times would mean months to take the data off.

The seek times don't matter if you want to read large chunks of data, it's the sustained read/write speeds that do, and it certainly won't take months. Also, I don't think we'll be using magnetic disks for much longer. 1 TB SSD's can be had for <$400 already.

> It's nice to have but the uplift needs to occur throughout the whole network for there to be benefit.

That uplift is happening. South Korea, Japan, and several US cities can already do symmetric gigabit connections to homes at very affordable prices. The world will follow with time.

I agree about "whole network" - you may be able to upload at 100Mbps or even faster to some hosts, but the Internet ultimately is not a circuit-switched network so the realistic speeds you'll get are highly dependent on the path and what other traffic is passing through the various routers and links along the way. The bottleneck may not be at the connection to your ISP, but somewhere else.

Despite having a connection that is advertised for 50Mbps down - and I have achieved that speed when accessing hosts relatively close to me - the average speeds I get among all the sites I visit and download files big enough to notice the speed from would appear to be in the 1-2Mbps range.

> But, why?

For example you may want way to backup huge video files, panoramic photos or any other huge files. Obvious solution is your own storage, but usually you'll want at least one extra backup point because HDD these days a lot less reliable than cloud services.

> The upload time / cost must be enormous (on my home DSL it would take all year to upload.

It's sad that not everyone around the world have fast internet connection, but with 100Mb/s it's would take just about 10 days. I personally don't have that fast speed, but from my experience Microsoft OneDrive can handle like 70Mb/s upload just fine.

Great for storing backups of services already on the cloud - OVH's primary customers.

For backups?

I've got fiber baby. Saturate the network card. 🚀

I heard some stories from someone inside OVH who told me that basically Hubic is not stable enough so you can lose some files (without knowing which ones). I wouldn't use Hubic seriously.

I'm using OVH for other services (dns, servers) and I'm quite happy with their services though.

How's the Linux support for hubiC? Could use this for backups.

They've had support since 2013, but it's supposedly still in beta: https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?272-hubiC-for-Linux-...!

I would call it half-hearted.

hubicfuse works but is unreliable (make sure you verify your transfers) and slow.

Hubicfuse is as stable as nitroglycerine. Completely unusable on OSX.

Last I checked their API was useless, can anyone comment on upload/download speeds (i have 10gbit servers could use backup location)

does this have client side encryption? they only mention login/password which doesn't really explain anything

https://hubic.com/en/data-security

It does not. Duplicity can use it, however, which does client-side encryption for you, as mentioned above.

Well, duplicity can usually use it. You may have connection problems, because hubic.com is TLS version-intolerant; it'll only use TLSv1.0 (and does NOT negotiate with TLSv1.1/TLSv1.2) with AES-256, AES-128 or 3DES, with RSA and no forward secrecy.

Not what I wanted to see.

It's OVH so I expect it to suck, and absolutely without support

Link with no tracking params: https://hubic.com/en/offers/storage-10tb

Should be ok for encrypted backups. I wouldn't trust a British company with anything sensitive, given their government's policy on privacy.

OVH is a french company, if you read their terms the contract is between you and OVH France.

Ok, thanks, assumed it was British because the prices were in pounds on linked page. EDIT: And now I see they were in euro, not my best day.

Are France any better? they outlawed encryption long after the Americans had given up on it.

Probably not, just trying to keep the facts straight. Offsite backups should always be encrypted on the client side, so it doesn't really matter where the provider is located or if it's trustworthy. (except for things like reliability / retrievability).

Can't disagree with that.

That is quite an outlandish statement, encryption is absolutely not outlawed in France.

The government is however, currently brewing an awful local version of the Patriot Act just as the US seems to be dismantling it.

Please read the history of encryption, France outlawed it for many years and then in the start only allowed weak encryption.

yes, but where the equipment is physically located is often of the most importance.

Indeed, in that case all three data centers are located in france. [0]

> The hubiC infrastructure is made up of 3 server pools, each one with several hundreds of servers and physically hosted in 3 geographically distant OVH datacentres: two in the north of France and one in the west.

[0] https://hubic.com/en/data-security