Ask Slashdot: Linux Mountable Storage Pool For All the Cloud Systems? 165
An anonymous reader writes "Many cloud systems are available on the market like: dropbox, google, sugar sync, or your local internet provider, that offer some free gigabytes of storage. Is there anything out there which can combine the storage into one usable folder (preferably linux mountable) and encrypt the data stored in the cloud? The basic idea would be to create one file per cloud used as a block device. Then combine all of them using a software raid (redundancy etc) with cryptFS on top. Have you heard of anything which can do that or what can be used to build upon?"
Why do this ? (Score:5, Insightful)
He has not said why he wants to do this, ie what problem he is trying to solve. Depending on the question the answer may be different. Does he want a cloud because:
* data must be available from many places - ie over the Internet ?
* data is to be safe from one place (ie home/office machine) blowing up and losing everything ?
* fast access is needed from many places at once ?
Please first answer these questions so that we may provide you with what you need rather than random solutions that may not be what you need.
Re:There are several options here (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the impression that, while Tahoe LAFS is the good option, the submitter of TFS is looking for the super-cheap option. He wants some sort of terrifying 'RAID-0-over-a-handful-of-different-interfaces-to-a-half-dozen-free-services-so-I-can-scrape-together-a-couple-gigs-here-and-a-couple-there' amalgamation. Unless he's planning some redundancy, that sounds like a recipe for data loss even if it were simple to set up, and you'd still be looking at a relatively paltry amount of storage space.
It sounds to me like the submitter needs to decide whether he wants to step up and pay for some actual hosts(for which Tahoe LAFS would probably be a good option), or one of the more paranoid dropbox-clones, or whether this is simply an exercise in cobbling scrap together because that can be amusing sometimes...
Re:Why do you want to combine them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most RAW file formats (RAW isn't a file format itself, but a designation covering a number of different formats) already include lossless compression.
Even if they didn't, compressing would create a lot of unnecessary work, because they're mostly valuable in the form that can be manipulated by image editing and management software. Anything other than the actual RAW format is dramatically reduced in value. Again, though, that's a moot point, because RAW formats generally include lossless compression already.
Re:Why do this ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager that OP is more interested in using 5 free accounts supplying 10GB each than to pay a monthly rent for 50GB.