You're now free to choose between all storage

This past weekend, I replaced a fan on my Drobo FS, a NAS unit that has been part of my digital life for over four years.  As I waded through tiny screws and cramped steel casing to get to the internals, I kept thinking to myself "why am I wasting my time with this?" And "why haven't I moved everything (mostly photos) to one of those recent free unlimited storage providers like Google Photos or Amazon Cloud Drive?"

 Attribution: Sergiodlarosa | Wikimedia Commons

My NAS, My Mastodon

For years, I've been lovingly referring to my NAS as a mastodon.  A powerful, strong, useful beast... that will eventually become extinct.  Cloud storage would surely win.  No hardware to personally maintain.  Ultimate elasticity and redundancy.  Much lower total cost of ownership.  A NAS with disks could cost upwards of $600 or $700, which could instead be user to pay for many years of unlimited cloud storage.  The cost of cloud storage has essentially been a big fat race to zero.  So what's my problem, and why am I living in the past?

Ultimately, I'm still anxious about privacy and skeptical about some of the true costs of free storage.  For example, Google Photos has a powerful search feature for my uploaded photos where I was able to enter a search for "watermelon" and find a picture from last year of my little girl wearing a watermelon dress.  While this is a killer feature for end-users, I also find it to be a bit unnerving.

Projecting into the future, Google will have yet an even better idea of where I've been and what I've been doing.  Demographic and psychographic marketing will be considered child's play compared to having total individual information about me.  If I upload camping pictures every month of me in an Arcteryx jacket, sipping on a can of Pepsi, then I'm probably going to be served Pepsi ads all day until my laptop gets diabetes.  I won't be able to go a day without seeing jackets, tents, and other gear from REI, The North Face, and Patagonia on sale. I won't be able to escape my consumer self.

Not everybody is squeamish about these kinds of things.  Today, for much of my data, it doesn't really matter.  But tomorrow may be a different story--when is too much information too much power?  I'm very interested in seeing how cloud storage and privacy evolve over the next decade.  There may be paid services that grow out of backlash against information harvesting.  Encryption, security, and two-factor authentication may quickly become more of a concern in the near future, at least for certain personal files and work files.

When it comes to storage, I am Pro-choice

Fortunately, in a multiverse of both storage options and user needs, a product like odrive can level the playing field and facilitate choices.  Without odrive, it would be painful to use multiple storage sources for content with different needs and contexts (e.g. OneDrive for my documents, Amazon Cloud Drive for my photos, a Google Drive account for work files, a personal Google Drive account, etc.).  With odrive it's simple... you can tailor a blended storage strategy according to the specific needs of your data--be it privacy, security, cost, accessibility features, reliability, compliance, or anything else.

So for now, I will keep my mastodon and move my photo archive to Amazon Cloud Drive (sorry, Google).  Fortunately, I have odrive File Server running on another computer at home so I can conveniently access my Drobo's contents as well.  Will there ever be a one-size-fits-all solution for all of my data?  I don't think so.  And with odrive, it doesn't matter.  Every provider can be a winner by providing the best solution for a particular use case, and every user can be a winner by using a combination of the best tools available.

Storage providers will come and go, but with odrive you can fluidly combine and organize your files so you're never forced to choose just one.

- Jeff

How to Backup Your Computers, Dropbox, Facebook... Everything

(Please note that we have recently updated odrive and have temporarily removed our odrive File Server. We will be adding it back in as soon as possible though!)

I try to dedicate some time each week to push the envelope a bit with our latest and greatest technologies, as they emerge from Engineering. I think it is beneficial in a few ways. First, it can help expose issues that may not be readily apparent through conventional use cases. Second, it helps to get the gears turning on where the product can go next, and what other use cases could be satisfied with slight variations in the use of our technology. Third, I just like to tinker with things and see how I can stretch existing technology to satisfy the various technological gaps I perceive in my day-to-day life.

One of those "gaps"

At home we have 2 laptops, 2 desktops, and a “file server” system with 4TB of available storage. In addition, my wife and I use Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, all on separate accounts. We literally have stuff everywhere. Of course, the odrive client will give you easy access to those cloud services, but I’ve been wanting more than just access to all of my cloud data, I want access to everything, including my laptops and desktops. Not only that, but I’ve been wishing for an easy way to backup all of my stuff to my 4TB of storage. Desktops, laptops, cloud services… all of it. I’ve got the storage, so I might as well use it, right? Also, it will give me peace of mind to have redundancy throughout my digital domain.

Many of you are already familiar with our odrive client, but some of you may not yet know about our odrive File Server (ofs for short), since it was just recently released to the public. ofs allows you to use the odrive client to access all existing content on a system, while overlaying individual and group ACLs on top of that data, and giving you some very cool insight into what is happening in real time, to boot.

Double impact with odrive and odrive File Server

As I was playing around with both the odrive client and ofs last week, it occurred to me that, when using both together, I could take the typical deployment model i.e. the odrive client on desktops and laptops and ofs on server systems, and switch it around. This could give me a way to accomplish my access and backup goals pretty easily. Using this alternate configuration, I can backup all of my data into a single location (my aforementioned “file server”).

A quick side note about my “file server”: In reality it is just a glorified Windows desktop I threw together to assume the role I needed, hence the quotes I’m putting around it. In this scenario, pretty much any reasonably capable system could be used as the backup box. The main dependency is the storage you will need to house all of your stuff.

The switch-up solution

So, I installed ofs on all of our laptops and desktops and then installed the odrive client on the backup system. I then linked to our desktops, laptops, and online services from the odrive client. At this point I had a single odrive client, residing on my backup system, that had access to all of my data, and I was able to set it all up in a matter of minutes. With the addition of some secret config settings (which I will share with you fine folks), I then switched the odrive client from its default progressive sync mode to full sync mode.

Progressive sync mode is extremely well suited to day-to-day access to all of your stuff online. Full sync mode, however, fits our backup use case perfectly. With full sync mode enabled, everything we’ve linked to will be pulled down to our backup system and kept in perfect sync, automatically.

How can I set this up myself?

Not too shabby, eh? So here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the odrive File Server from here and install it on each of your machines, except the one you are using as your backup system.

2. Configure the admin user and note the link url of each machine. We will need this information later.

3. Create a new “backup” user on each machine running ofs and give this user access to the directories you wish to backup on that specific machine. For example your My Documents and Desktop directories.

4. Download the odrive client from here and install it on your backup system

5. Download the following config file here and place it on the backup system in either:

   1. Windows: %userprofile%/.odrive/config/

   2. OS X: ~/.odrive/config/

6. Restart the odrive client

7. Link to each machine setup in steps 1-3 in the odrive client. Use the “backup” user credentials created in step 3.

8. Link to all of your cloud services in the odrive client (Ex: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Facebook, etc.)

Now you can sit back, relax, and watch the magic happen as all of your files, from all of your disparate sources, automatically and continuously sync to your backup system. It will pick up changes to your sources very quickly too (between 5-15 seconds for most sources). This means you can also take a quick look at that one backup system, at any time, to eyeball everything you own, in near real-time.

Continuing the discussion..

There’s a lot to like here folks. Its easy, fast, and free, so give it a try.

I realize there are portions of this solution that can fleshed out into more detail, and I’m happy to delve further into the specifics in our odrive forums. So, if you have any questions or comments, head on over and let us know. We would love to hear from you!

You can also keep up-to-date on what’s going on here at odrive by following us on Twitter and Facebook.

- Tony

Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive →

“Dead man walking.” That is what many in the storage industry are calling IBM’s storage hardware business. But its storage competitors, including EMC or HP, should not be so quick to wave that flag, as they may follow suit before too long. We are already seeing similar trending signs of their downfall.

War of the Giants

The cloud storage war being waged by Amazon, Google and Microsoft has been well publicized, and is resulting in the cost of all cloud infrastructure including storage racing to zero.

As you can see from the graph below, Amazon was the only real game in town for several years, and the price of cloud storage hardly moved the needle. It was only after Microsoft and Google got into the game in 2010 that we saw any real price movements. There were two distinct price battles waged in 2012, with moderate price drops. Earlier this year in March, the gloves came off and the cloud storage prices bottomed out to the current $.024/GB level.

Where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, to zero. When? Perhaps as soon as this summer or by year end. Will it literally go to zero? Maybe no, maybe yes. If you only had to pay $.001/GB, that works out to $1/TB. Oh yeah, that feels like zero!

Casualty of War

It’s well established that cloud storage is 10X better. It’s more accessible, more secure, elastic, pay-as-you-go.

Today, we are all on mobile devices, work everywhere and generate ever increasing amount of data. Our work and personal lives are set up as the perfect playground for cloud storage.

Now that the cost of cloud storage is near-zero, the business choice to abandon clunky, expensive traditional storage is a no brainer.

Some Not-So-Bold Predictions

For most small businesses and newer companies born in the cloud, the shift to cloud storage is already happening and will be at close to 100 percent in three years.

For larger businesses with existing data centers and lots of existing data, the shift will be slower and take a different path. Most will start with less sensitive data sets. As reflexive concerns like data sovereignty and regulatory compliance give way to convenience and common sense, the transformation will be complete. Within five years, I believe that a majority of enterprises will have at least 50 percent of their data in the cloud.

Zombie Life

No doubt, the traditional storage players will attempt to slow the adoption with the same tired, overplayed FUD, but the train has already left the building. However, this will just be prolonging the inevitable. It will be like the un-dead walking among us. As we’ve seen in the movies, the zombies can now run fast and talk intelligibly. Perhaps the traditional storage players have a fighting chance after all.

Author’s note: The data research for the top graph involved a mix of public announcements, a search of the Internet Archive and efforts from others who attempted to track the price changes such asDavid Rosenthal. This also involved some guesstimation on my part for some begin and end dates of a price change as I was able to ascertain a price on a given date but was not able to confirm with a public announcement.

As you can see, the negative trend spans the industry and does not discriminate.

Editor’s note: Alex Teu is the vice president of business development at Oxygen Cloud and odrive.