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Keep Your Stuff, for Life

perkeep.org

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Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#71

Post by PurpleRamen »

darkwater wrote: post #61

Last released version 0.10 is from May 2018. Is this project still alive? Last commit is from March 11 2020 so maybe they are just "slow" at releasing.

Last commit was just a simple bugfix in documentation. The last juicy commits were in december 2019 and https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/graphs/code-frequency makes the impression that activity has slowed down in 2019 significantly. Maybe they reached the point of good enough, but the high number of open issues and mergerequests is still problematic.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#72

Post by TheOperator »

lostlogin wrote: post #56
mnw21cam wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I used to back up onto DVDs, creating a set of (say) 12 DVDs with an extra couple generated by par2, to take care of the case where some of the DVDs just straight aren't readable. However, I found that I had a lot of data to back up, and it was actually cheaper and less tedious to get 4TB USB hard drives for ~£100 each, and plug them into an old defunct EeePC901 (with the added advantage that if the power goe…

Re: 4Tb drives, I do the dollars-per-mb calculation before buying hard drives. The most recent time I included the enclosure cost and found that it was actually cheaper to go huge. Granted the enclosure was a Synology, but buying 16TB drives is the closest I’ve been so ‘solving’ storage in a long time. Formatting them and adding them to the array was brutal, and they are noisy, but it has been worth it.

Buying enough 16tb drives for an efficient raid array is an expensive way to save money.

Something that's easy to overlook with larger drives is that their rebuild times are worse.

"Shucking" drives throws the economics way off even if it means having to do some hacks and losing warranty... Usually the drives that come in enclosures are smaller.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#73

Post by eexan »

cpach wrote: post #47

Does anyone know how mature Perkeep is? Is anyone using it regularly? Would love to hear if there is anyone who has experience with it.

Very immature, just have a look at its extensive absent documentation. The best bit that describes the state of things: "If you're a programmer or fairly technical, you can probably get it up and running and get some utility out of it".

So much to show off for 7 years of development, I'm pretty skeptical of its future. But some of the ideas are pretty cool, like composable blob servers.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#74

Post by brnt »

na85 wrote: post #5

I admire the goal of reliable long term data storage. I don't need to store tweets or 5TB videos, but my current solution is duplicate DVDs with a bunch of par2 files to hopefully ward off bit rot. I feel like there's some room for improvement.

Anyone who uses par2 to protect a filetree, I wrote a small utility to help you maintain that filetree (e.g. bulk verify/create/status) [1].

[1] https://github.com/brenthuisman/par2deep

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#75

Post by natural219 »

lukecameron wrote: post #30
natural219 wrote: post #20

Ah, nostalgia :). It seems like with the recent wave of news about social media migrations (reddit, facebook, twitter, twitch, tiktok), people are hopefully starting to get more and more warmed up to the idea of protocolization of their social data. But most of the projects doing it are still just too immature. Solid, Perkeep, Blockstack, etc. just seem like vaporware. Seems like the only serious projects in use are…

I want that protocolization too, although I don't hold out much hope that the monopolies in place can be broken, outside of fairly radical regulation. To add to your list, there is also Secure Scuttlebutt [1] which has had a decent userbase over the past few years, and Planetary [2] which is a funded iOS client for it. I think in general they all suffer from the chicken-egg problem and will need some reason for enoug…

Ah, I forgot about SSB. Very unique project and interesting people working on it.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#76

Post by taneq »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #9

Wow, it was really hard to find out what this software does. I finally found a demo at the end of an hour-long talk from 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/PlAU_da_U4s?t=2687 So it seems to have a bunch of scripts to import data into its database from a variety of sources (including cloud services), and provides a search interface to navigate that historical data. And it has a lot of under-the-hood stuff about replication…

Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well?

> Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.

I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least. Looks interesting, I've been in the market for this kind of self hosted backup/replication/tagging/search thing.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#77

Post by taneq »

michaelt wrote: post #63
reallydontask wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Either you're user-centered, or you're not. It really depends on the audience for the product, targeting regular users does require more thought on the UX, etc which almost invariably means more funding.

I don't think the website targets the wrong audience - just the copywriter was so involved in the project they forgot to make what they're offering clear. When someone says "permanently keep your stuff, for life" do they mean some sort of pay-once eternal backup, like permanent.org? Something censorship-resistant, like Freenet? Something peer-to-peer and distributed-ledger based like Filecoin? Backing up data locked…

Just from the front page it looks like a software stack for running your own archive server?

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#78

Post by eexan »

ahupp wrote: post #22

It sounds like this preserves your data from lots of different services. This is something I need! But I couldn't figure out what it actually supports. Suggestion: the very first paragraph should describe the specific inputs it can handle.

For the most part, it's just an object storage (think Amazon S3). Content addressable (think Git): you put an object (file bytes) in, and you can get it out by its hash, that's it.

There are some bits (permanodes and claims) for adding metadata to objects (filename, timestamp, geo location and other attributes, I think even arbitrary jsons) and for authentication/sharing. A few really cool bits around modularity: blob servers can be composed over network - you can transparently split your blob storage over multiple machines, databases, cloud services, set up replication, maybe encryption (unclear to me if it works or not).

Importing data from different services is not really its core competency, at least not yet. It can ingest anything you can put on your file system and there are importers for a few third-party services (see https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/tree/master/pkg/importer ), but that's about it

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#79

Post by eexan »

mro_name wrote: post #25
awinter-py wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah like a lot of OSS backup products the docs are grandiose without focusing on ease of operation / feature parity with dropbox

no wonder looking at the funding, is it?

About $30k - https://opencollective.com/perkeep/expenses - which is more than most OSS projects would ever see in their lifetime, so it's not such a good excuse for lacking documentation and UX.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#80

Post by CGamesPlay »

taneq wrote: post #76
CGamesPlay wrote: post #9

Wow, it was really hard to find out what this software does. I finally found a demo at the end of an hour-long talk from 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/PlAU_da_U4s?t=2687 So it seems to have a bunch of scripts to import data into its database from a variety of sources (including cloud services), and provides a search interface to navigate that historical data. And it has a lot of under-the-hood stuff about replication…

Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least.…

For me it didn’t. That sentence is too vague as to what I as a user will be able to do with this project.
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