Monthly Archives: October 2011

Technology

Comcast and cloud storage

October 21, 2011 – 5:00 pm

After realizing I have 100+ gb of online storage ready to go, I’m planning to backup all my digital photos. Today I have an external hard drive and some DVD-Rs with these backups, but I’m pretty sure all of my backups are still in the same physical location. Given that 19 fire trucks showed up for a fire drill at my apartment building a few weeks back, I think it’s time to do a little more robust backup-ing.

To get started, I’m backing up my iPhone photos — 2049 mb apparently across iPhone 1 and iPhone 3 GS. Unhappily, it looks like it will take a bit over 4 hours on my Comcast cable modem; the upload is running at ~77kb/sec.

Also, it occurs to me that backing up on multiple cloud providers is going to be pretty expensive in terms of time. Let’s say I have something like 15 gb of photos (I’m not even sure how much I have, to be honest — stored across 3 different computers and an external NAS). That’s something like 32 hours of uploading per cloud provider if all goes well.

Since I don’t really trust either 1and1 hosting (horror stories) or box.net (giving out free 50 gb personal plans — look at prior competitors like AOL’s Xdrive, which gave out 5 gb free in ~2007 or 2008, but then shut down), the most prudent thing is for me to upload all files to both providers; doubling my time to upload at 64 hours now!

Three further problems encountered tonight:

  • The uploads don’t go very smoothly. The box.net Java bulk uploader basically froze up about 1/5th through — and there was no way to “restart” the upload. I switched over to the AJAXy magic uploader on their normal website, which works better (it detects stalled uploads and asks the user if they want to restart); however, I’ve had two files stall, and the FF7 browser crash once (with many assorted tabs open, but I think viewing iCloud’s Find My iPhone did it in).  This means I’m manually babysitting the overall process (determining the last file uploaded and continuing it from there), and the 4 hours estimated time has now dragged on to 6 hours so far at only 2/3rds complete.
  • Comcast limits to 250 gb per month combined upload & download. This isn’t great, since the last few months I’ve used between 50 gb to 100 gb per month; so far this month, I’ve hit 140 gb about halfway through the billing cycle. I don’t use BitTorrent or anything; I just constantly have streaming music running, watch Netflix HD a lot, and am an overall heavy internet user from morning ’till night. Now adding in another ~30+ gb of backups for the next few months, I should still be fine with Comcast, but it’s annoying to have to think about limits. Comcast state that the median user within the 99% segment of their users consumes approx 6 to 8 gb / month, which is pretty low given that a single HD movie on Netflix takes 2.3 gb per hour.
  • Given that uploads are a little flaky, I’m wondering if I should zip files up under heavy compression and possibly with a little encryption. Encryption is nice for peace of mind in the case that my login/password credentials are somehow compromised, but also makes it such that (1) the online backup isn’t really easily accessible from any location in a casual manner (e.g. I just log on and get what I need — instead I have to unencrypt, etc.), (2) I have to redownload the entire zip file to extract out a single file, (3) I don’t think there is an easy way to ensure the file upload was successful (no way to compare MD5 checksums or anything), and (4) I don’t have a great way to ensure that I can decrypt the files after substantial time passes (passwords are forgotten, keys are lost, etc.).

All of these issues existed years ago when Streamload and Xdrive were popularizing online backups originally. I think we’re all more comfortable with this practice now, but I’m not sure we’ve substantially changed anything for personal users. (For companies, we’re talking about completely different mechanics — higher bandwidth available, servers are always running so no worries about the girlfriend shutting the laptop lid, and it’s less of a “once in a while” user-driven behavior as much as an always running mandate to keep data replicated.).

I’m wondering if the best recommendation for home bulk-file backup is still to go with a NAS at home, plus periodically dropping off an external hard drive at a friend or relative’s house.

PS: I’m aware there are some 3rd party software solutions out there which can interface with Box.net and also do multiple-cloud redundant backup, but I simply don’t want to do that. The basic tools provided by the service should be good enough to handle my genuinely simple & common use case.

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Technology

Why doesn’t box.net use SSL for personal plans?

October 16, 2011 – 8:42 am

Update (10/21/11): A PM at Box.net posted in their support forums that free personal accounts are using SSL for file transfers, which is great! Other users seemed to be similarly confused about the state of SSL on Box.net, so I’m glad it is resolved now. More details

I still think it’s odd they don’t make a bigger deal about this on their website — it’s such an easy thing to say (Security is important to us. That’s why we always use SSL for file transfers, and have tons of great security features, etc.). Also, they could consider putting the whole website under SSL for added piece of mind. To me, online file storage can be of similar importance to banking — if the file weren’t important, I wouldn’t be backing it up. As a competitive note: the entire Google Docs and Dropbox websites are https.

I understand SSL isn’t the end-all of security, but since I’m on (private) wifi in a large apartment building, I like to think we’re at least making it a little harder to keep bad guys out.

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I’m not even sure what the name of the industry is these days: online file space, cloud storage, hosted backup, elastic storage…  but it’s free and it’s everywhere now. At work we rely on Google Docs (25 gb), with some limited Dropbox (2 gb) usage as well. I’m eligible for Apple’s 5 gb of iCloud, and through my webhost I have 50 gb. My personal Google account has a bit less than 8 gb space, and I’d guess that I have another handful of gigs through my alumni association.

All-in-all, tons of space, none of which do I really use for personal backup.

However, I saw a Slickdeals.net post for 50 gb free at box.net if you use the iPhone app, and signed up. To be honest, I thought the deal was for Dropbox, so I was pretty excited (and confused when my Dropbox credentials weren’t accepted — took me coming back a day later to realize it was a completely different service!).

Anyhow, I have 50 gb there now as well. However, the features page for box.net personal accounts seemed a little questionable: apparently, you only get SSL file transfers if you are on a business or enterprise plan. I don’t really understand — why does the personal plan on box.net not have secure file transfers?

256-bit SSL encryption for file transfers with Box Business. Enterprise accounts also include server-level encryption.

It’s actually baffling to me. I’m not an expert in this area, but isn’t using SSL considered a best practice for this kind of application?

Is there any cost to putting all file transfers behind SSL? Since each file is probably new/unique to box.net, I’d assume there are no caching implications, and I can’t imagine there is a huge CPU cost given that, well, it’s supported by default for business/enterprise users, and SSL is supported client-side with browsers and server-side with, well, all modern web servers (right?).

It seems to me that with pretty major hacking incidents reported on a daily basis, security should be baked in as a part of the infrastructure of any product — as opposed to used as a feature differentiator between billing plans. Why be reactive to some box.net hacking incident instead of proactively try to protect customers?

The oddest part about this is that Dropbox uses SSL for their basic (free) plan, so you’d think that box.net would do it too just to be on a level playing field with their competitor. Box.net must have justified (internally) some reason why it makes sense not to offer SSL for everyone. Weird.

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Personal

Another year of health insurance down

October 10, 2011 – 6:03 pm

I’ve been in Boston for over a year now, and somewhat surprisingly, haven’t been to the doctor’s office yet. This actually marks the second job where I’ve not used health insurance in the first full year of employment… Good to be healthy, bad to pay quite a lot for healthcare that wasn’t used!

Here’s to having another year of good health.

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