Using Gmail as an offsite backup

[undyingking]

Just in case this is of interest to anyone, I've been looking into the practicalities of using a Gmail account as a backup device. I was thinking it could be quite useful to be able to store copies of key stuff on Google's servers, 2GB is plenty of space to hold all I need to keep, and it ought to be straightforward and painless to keep the backup up-to-date via ADSL line.

Obviously you don't want to be emailing yourself myriads of files on a daily basis, that wouldn't be very practical. A usable solution is going to be one that treats the Gmail account as a filesystem, ie. you can just drag and drop the files you want to backup onto it. I've been told that this is contrary to Google's terms of use (although I can't find the relevant clause if so), but I've not heard of them actually objecting.

I've been looking at two different pieces of software that do this, RoamDrive and Gmail Drive. Both are free.

Gmail Drive is very smoothly integrated with Windows Explorer -- after you install it, it just appears as an extra drive under your 'My Computer'. You can then just drag and drop files to it exactly as you would to any other drive. It won't let you upload files larger than 10 MB (which is a Gmail limitation), or with filenames longer than 40 characters, or of certain extensions (.exe and .zip among them). If you're copying a load of files and it hits one that's illegal under these rules, the whole process stops: and there's no 'no to all' option when asked if you want to replace identical files, so incremental backups are a bit of a pain. There are versions for Mac and Linux, but I haven't looked at them.

RoamDrive is not integrated into Explorer, but has its own window into which you can drag and drop stuff. It has no file size limit, and no restrictions on filename length or extensions -- this is because basically it performs some sort of tarring and zipping operation on your whole requested transfer, and then breaks it up into chunks before uploading. This is very clever but does mean that when you want to see what files are on the backup, it takes ages to produce a list, presumably because it has to download a good deal of it to find out. It also fails extremely frequently during upload, and a partial upload is unusable -- you have to start the whole thing again. On the plus side it works with Hotmail accounts as well as Gmail ones. But on the minus, it carries adverts, including some nasty popunders.

To be honest I don't think I can wholly recommend either of these products, if like me you typically want to back up an entire project folder containing a mix of large and small files of different types. Gmail Drive's restrictions I find a bit too restrictive, and I have to use a third-party directory-comparison tool to manage incremental backups, which is a pain. RoamDrive would be good except that it fails far too often -- that's the main thing really, the rest I could live with. Probably though if you only want to back up a small number of files of smallish size, either owuld be fine. Well, they're both under development, so who knows, maybe the magic solution is out there somewhere. Or maybe Google will kill this whole practice at their end...

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Hmm... There ought to be money to be made from this.

After all, I can buy a 250 gig drive from work for 72 quid. And on that, I could supply the backup needs for 125 users of your storage requirements. Say 10 quid per person, per year? (which is probably vastly underestimating the market!)

Nice little earner there. Bandwidth might be an issue though...

[(Anonymous)]

Not to mention security, which would be my main concern with any off-site backup service (while _I_ might know to encrypt any files kept on a server not under my direct control, I'm reasonably sure I am in the minority here).

Most of my stuff is on more than one server anyhow, but I keep meaning to burn some of the more critical stuff to DVD and put it in our storage unit the next time I swing past there...

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Gah, the above was me, I didn't realise LJ had logged me out. *mutter*

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I thought "goodness, some really is being security-conscious if they won't even discuss such matters openly"... but yes, it would be nice if it was encrypted / decrypted on-the-fly as well.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

;)

John GC was contemplating such a service a _long_ time ago -- certainly pre-2000 -- but I don't believe he ever got round to doing anything about it, as that was before server space, disk space and bandwidth really got down to a price where the service could be priced to attract anyone other than a very small number of people.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Apple do this for $99 a year, with other synchronisation stuff. Friends swear by it

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I don't see why software couldn't be provided (in a similar manner to RoamDrive or Gmail Drive) which automatically encrypted the data for transmission to the remote location. This (hypothetical) software wouldn't have to go through all the hoops that the originals do, because the remote server would be expecting this kind of file storage :)

Of course, you've then got the question of "is the security good enough? And if it says it's Blowfish, is it really Blowfish?"

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

There you go, you're halfway to speccing it already!

[smallbeasts.livejournal.com]

That would be Box Backup. I think there's a Windows version as well as the original Unix version.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That would be great, except that a sufficient quantity of storage space isn't affordably available on any server I can connect to via SSH or even FTP -- Gmail's free 2GB is my only source of cheap large storage, and it's only accessible via the email hoops.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

D'you want an account on my boxen? Currently with 14 gig free under /home, and 58 gig free under /mnt/mpeg-ext (the 80 Gig drive of /mnt/mpeg-3 is full :)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Actually, the bandwidth might be an issue: I've only got 128 kilo bits upload (to you) speed.

OTOH, I'm currently using CVS on my home machine to store the source for work (since I can access that from home, whereas I couldn't, if I were doing this "properly" and storing it at work), and it works fine.

But that source is only 18.2 Meg, not 1 gig...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, no need for CVS for most of this stuff, it's archival as much as anything. The transfers will be quite small if they can be purely incremental. Let's see if vicarage can sort me out though, rather than burden yours further if I don't need to ;-)

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

I was just wondering whether rdiff-backup (which I use locally) could be persuaded to use encryption -- the easiest way would probably be to do the backup onto some kind of encrypted drive, rather than encrypting each individual file (it works over SSH so the end-to-end encryption is already sorted).

TBH the main problem with such services where you're storing encrypted data is the liability issue for the service with whom you're storing it. I'm sure our beloved Government -- or, if not ours, then the US's -- could make a case for prosecuting someone running such a service if it was later found that the encrypted data was something the Government concerned considered "dodgy".

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'll happily pay a tenner a year to do it just via FTP -- but yes, unless you could manage the incrementality cleverly it would be getting on a gig a day from me...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I've considered backing up to GMail in the past, but it's really only good for short-term backups since we never know when GMail might decide to clamp down on this sort of thing.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Indeed: I'm sure they will at some point.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I'm prepared to take the risk that my computer giving up the ghost in some way and GMail going down what happen too simultaneously, but the character restriction for filenames makes the option completely unworkable in practice. I'd have had to change the filenames of hundreds and hundreds of files.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, you young whippersnappers -- I spent my first six years of work having to give everything 8.3 filenames!

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

You are welcome to put data on my machine, as I've a shiny new 250Gb disk only half full, and plenty of bandwidth. That way your data would be safe from a 1km dinosaur killer which could happily blat you, bibliogirl and wimble. Access through ssh. I'd use rsync from Unix, you can do
something similar from Windows, keeping the 2 directories in sync, only transferring changes.

I do this to alexmc's machine, so my photos are safe from a Norad strike.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

woohoo! -- that would be excellent, thanks! Pray do set me up an account.

BTW did you receive the test emails I sent on Tuesday, one to your own domain and one to your yahoo account? Subject "Test 200603211541".

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Account set up. ssh mo@manse.johnbray.org.uk, password your surname.

I got a yahoo mail, nothing to johnbray.org.uk

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I shall log on shortly.

Ah, I sent it to jrbray.org.uk rather than johnbray, is that obsolete?

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

jrbray.org.uk has been defunct for a couple of years

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Heh, it turns out my email client knew that, but my database didn't...

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Amazon have recently started doing something similar but I haven't looked into it properly. In particular it could have be US-only or have a minimum amount that you have to pay per month which becomes unreasonable.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

interesting! -- hmm, that looks like could be pretty useful.

(Also intrigued by the Amazon Mechanical Turk... got to think of a good application for that!)

similar but for pop3 accounts too

[(Anonymous)]

For those that are looking programs for using Gmail as online storage,
check out Vombato Mail Drive which now has GMail support. It also allows
you to use any of your POP3 account the same way.

http://www.vombato.com/