The best part of git-annex assistant is that the developer managed to deliver, or even over-deliver what he was pitching in Kickstarter campaign. There wasn't a single week in the whole year where he didn't do some real work on the project. You can check his development blog [1] for details.
Sustaining git-annex development
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#22For those of you wondering whether this is worth supporting, the answer is Yes. I work with a lot of smart engineers, and periodically ask them what they do for personal backup of images, video, etc. I don't think I've yet talked to someone who was satisfied with their system. Git annex (with the assistant) brings me closer to my ideal system than I've been before: a drive at home, one in my desk drawer at work for f…
Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster recovery. Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found. This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular…
As I understand it, HFS+ can silently corrupt your data; so, Time Machine could potentially propagate that "corrupt" data all the way through your backup disks (and possibly wipe out older, "correct" data!)
We need integrity checking both at file-system level and at backup-solution level. If I'm not mistaken, with Time Machine on an HFS+ volume, we don't have the former, and the latter is file-based and not block-based (making it not very efficient, space-wise).
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#23Blimey, https://campaign.joeyh.name/blog/initial_goal_reached_in_sev...
Congratulations!
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#24I can't remember why I didn't switch to git-annex from Unison, although it did put me onto bup (which still doesn't quite do what I want either).
I think my biggest problem was by and large I want a versioning sync tool, and worry a lot less about managing what's on my devices.
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#25We (rsync.net) are supporting git-annex by offering all git-annex users a heavily discounted rsync.net account. This was announced a few days ago, but not on HN in any way: http://rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html We've been explicitly supporting git-annex on our platform since our friend Jason Scott first showed it to us[1] and we will be contributing to the new campaign. [1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archi…
That's nice :) And just so people know without having to check the site: > git-annex users may sign up for our full featured offsite filesystem at a rate of 10 cents per GB, per month. An annual payment is required, and the minimum account size is 50 GB. There are no usage/bandwidth charges, no signup fee, and no contract to sign.
Wow, that looks great. With the discount it matches S3's storage pricing, but without bandwidth charges, with a more convenient interface (an ssh-reachable regular filesystem), and full-service support. Plus an interesting attempt at a "warrant canary": http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#26For those of you wondering whether this is worth supporting, the answer is Yes. I work with a lot of smart engineers, and periodically ask them what they do for personal backup of images, video, etc. I don't think I've yet talked to someone who was satisfied with their system. Git annex (with the assistant) brings me closer to my ideal system than I've been before: a drive at home, one in my desk drawer at work for f…
Time Machine to a local drive for immediate restores. Backblaze for disaster recovery. Time Machine could easily be replaced by cron and tar or some other local backup option. Other backup providers are easily found. This is not to say anything about git-annex's usefulness or the value of supporting the developer. It just surprises me when engineers are still struggling with backups. I can kind of understand "regular…
> I can kind of understand "regular folk", but that's not really the git-annex market, either.
I haven't used it yet, but the git-annex assistant is trying to target that niche, with a goal of an easy-as-Dropbox user experience that hides the technical aspects of git-annex under the hood: http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#27Is there a German cloud storage provider that I can use as a git annex remote?
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#28I can't remember why I didn't switch to git-annex from Unison, although it did put me onto bup (which still doesn't quite do what I want either). I think my biggest problem was by and large I want a versioning sync tool, and worry a lot less about managing what's on my devices.
I think you can automate most or all of that with the git annex assistant now (and I think most of its functionality is exposed as commandline commands as well, so you don't have to use the GUI if you don't want to).
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#29His personal finances are really impressive. Selling his fulltime dedication for 12k/year...
I don't recall where I read about it, but my understanding is the developer lives a very frugal lifestyle in an off-grid environment, something akin to homesteading but with an internet connection. His costs are as minimal as he can make them, and in turn he can both spend more time on his work, and be fully commissioned with campaigns like this. I think he was also involved with the Debian GNU/Linux installer.
> I think he was also involved with the Debian GNU/Linux installer.
Yes he was (might still be, too). That where I'd first heard of Joey.
Re: Sustaining git-annex development
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nice :) And just so people know without having to check the site: > git-annex users may sign up for our full featured offsite filesystem at a rate of 10 cents per GB, per month. An annual payment is required, and the minimum account size is 50 GB. There are no usage/bandwidth charges, no signup fee, and no contract to sign.
Wow, that looks great. With the discount it matches S3's storage pricing, but without bandwidth charges, with a more convenient interface (an ssh-reachable regular filesystem), and full-service support. Plus an interesting attempt at a "warrant canary": http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
That canary thing is an interesting trick, previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702247. (Four years ago!)