/ Andreas | System administrator /

I usually prefer to keep my data in a cloud somewhere, or at least in a treehouse or something else which isn’t local disk. Anything not having to depend on sitting in front of the “right” computer.

Currently the treehouse where most of my data lives is a VPS I rent in a datacenter. More specifically I use Subversion to keep my files synced on different computers.

Another option I’m looking into right now is the online service Dropbox. If you aren’t already familiar with them you might want to take a look at their screencast.

Dropbox being really convenient my big question is on the issue of trust and confidentiality. What kind of (private) data do I dare to entrust them with? Not being entirely sure, perhaps the real question is about which files are non-sensitive enough to be entrusted to any somewhat reliable third party.

Depending on whatever you keep separate backups, which you really should do, the integrity of your data could potentially be a big issue.  I have no idea really. I’ll just continue to do my backups, because that is what I do.

Availability on the other hand isn’t something I’m too worried about. If nothing else you ought to have a rather recently updated working directory most of the time.

Having confidentiality, integrity and availability covered, it’s time to get back to the topic of Dropbox being potentially convenient and useful. After all, why else would I want to use it in the first place?

While it’s a nice way to keep my files in sync the biggest benefit of using Dropbox might actually be when you are to collaborate with others. Dropbox makes it really easy to share folders between different users.  Yes, Dropbox even has some basic revision control.  This might be a good compromise if you work with people whom might not find a real version control system entirely intuitive.

When it comes to online services I most definitely prefer no nonsense providers. I don’t want any specially designed tools or extravagant web pages, I merely want a basic service done well.

Two great examples are the DNS provider primary.se and the offsite storage rsync.net. They give you a quality service accessed by standard protocols. Nothing more, nothing less.

Let’s simply call it services by geeks, for geeks.

The majority of my private data are storied in subversion repositories. This is not because I write a lot of code, which I don’t. Neither do I have any special need to control different versions of the pictures in my photo gallery. No, in my case it’s simply an attempt to gain the effects of a distributed file system.

While I’ve previously been using SSHFS with pretty good results, it’s no doubt nice having a local cache (working directory) available. You never know when you’ll end up offline or on a slow connection.

Of course, there are lots of different software available if you merely want to sync files back and forth. The benefit of using a version control system is that you really don’t have to worry about unknowingly overwriting files. Besides, I do like the clean server-client model which Subversion provides.

Still, this isn’t exactly what Subversion was made for and, no doubt, there are caveats to be aware of. Myself I’ve had problems handling filenames containing “funny” characters (such as the swedish letters å, ä and ö). Just to be on the safe side I now try to stay in the lower ascii. There’s also the pristine copy, which might give you an unpleasant surprise if you for some reason would ask Subversion to handle something like your multimedia library.

By now I’ve been keeping my documents, etc in Subversion for a couple of months and as a whole I’m more than satisfied with the solution. Besides, it’s a lot easier to setup than your own AFS environment.