archiving as opposed to backing up

[Tom Jennings]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 08:40, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

> This service managed to survive the dot-bomb:
> 
> http://www.xdrive.com/
> 
> It creates a drive letter on your system that is symbolically linked to
> some storage space sitting on their servers.

A useful service I admit. You could implement this by simulating a
remote "mount" using an ssh tunnel, or (ugh) NFS.

I wonder (only academically) how they handle privacy, access by
authorities, etc. For data integrity, I assume they at least run RAID5
and hopefully multiply geographically diverse data centers (but I would
ask not assume if I were to use them -- and get it in writing :-)

It's kinda like paying for a burial plot. Fresh flowers and cut grass,
but you and all your relatives are dead and stop paying, they dig you up
and toss your bones in an anonymous pile.

Good for salesmammals on the road I suppose, but really, 10GB fits into
the smallest of laptops, and if you need 100GB of portable data, there's
DVD-Rs.