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C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

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Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#12
Very interesting. Aside from the slight inconvenience of not being able to use standard tools like ftp, scp and rsync... Amazon Cloud Drive's $60 a year plan (https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/) is still significantly cheaper for storing more than ~2.5TB. It's also free of charges per operation and such like.

Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#13
post #4

No mention of what technology is backing the service, however I like the support for existing file transfer protocols (particularly SFTP), no need to wait for or build yourself an integration, existing tooling just works.

From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#14

Any different than Backblaze B2? Seems that B2 is still cheaper and more mature.

With C14 you create a "safe", you upload your data, and once done (or after 7 days), they archive your safe. To retrieve data, you need to ask for the safe to be unarchived and you get access back to your data, for 7 days.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#15
post #13
post #4

No mention of what technology is backing the service, however I like the support for existing file transfer protocols (particularly SFTP), no need to wait for or build yourself an integration, existing tooling just works.

From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.

sounds similar to backblaze... though they use XFS (IIRC) for their file system, but do the RAID type stuff themselves...

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.

sounds similar to backblaze... though they use XFS (IIRC) for their file system, but do the RAID type stuff themselves...

Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.

sounds similar to backblaze... though they use XFS (IIRC) for their file system, but do the RAID type stuff themselves...

You're right about their cross-rack RAID-like stack, but didn't Backblaze switch to ext4 in the meantime?

Re: C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage

#19
tl;dr: a cheap data archival solution; upload is free, storage is cheap (€0.002 / GB / mo), download is somewhat less cheap (€0.01 / GB) and not instant; rsync / sftp IS supported for upload, but an API call is needed to complete the operation.

Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from, but would like to keep just in case.

(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)

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