Today I received a e-mail from a good friend of mine, to make a test to know how likely would I eat my friends in case of emergency. The website is called “Would You Eat Your Buddies in a Blizzard?”. Here I post my results, and invite you to take the test and post back your results in the comments… I want to know with who I would arrange my vacations!!!

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I came up with a name for this project, and the cool thing, is that I can use my domain as an acronym. So DBUGS stands for Digital Backup Using Gmail Storage.

So, what do I have in mind? Well, I came across some weeks ago, with Richard Jone s’s project, the GmailFS. This project, and using his words, provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. I read the entire site, and several other sites on the web, only to find out, that although this already can be achieved, some problems still need to be fixed, but since my project for now, exists only on paper, I hope that in the future, a more robust GmailFS, can be used.

What I propose here, is, to combine some cool open source technologies, to obtain a big, expandable online backup, but things like cost and reliability also come to my mind. Now it’s possible to create your own Gmail account for free, and all the tools I suggest using are open-source, so the cost factor, it’s only regarding your Internet connection, which by all means, must be broadband!

So, since it’s possible to mount GMail accounts locally, I started imagining the possibility, to use 2 accounts in a RAID1 setup (mirror), where Gmail_account1 would be the mirror of Gmail_account2. This way, data would be backed up twice, in two different locations. If one dies, the other remains alive, while we add a new one to the array. When I say 2 accounts (arrays), I mean n arrays, since, for RAID1 you can use 2+n arrays, this way, data is mirrored against several locations.

The next step in my theory would be size. Google already offers almost 3GB of storage, and rumors are that they will increase this for 9GB+, but what about if you want more? My thoughts went straight to a LVM setup, for the extra layer of complexity! Now we would have 2+n arrays, each made by LVM volumes, which
would be created using several (1 + N) accounts. Confused? I am! This way, each of the RAID1 array would be stripped across different accounts, and in the future, if we wanted to expand the size of our online backup disk, it was just a matter of creating new accounts, and adding those to each of the LVMs, so our RAID1 array would get bigger.

I also thought of security, and the best to do this, is using disk encryption. Another layer is added to the already tricky setup, but this is not important in the beginning, since for testing, I would not use sensitive data.

To perform the backups, I really think it’s a good idea to use some sort of rsync+cp+mv solution that performs incremental backups, without taking too much space. You can find many options for this online, but one my favorites is RSnapshot. A good source of information for this type of backup is Mike Rubel’s site on the subject.

And that’s it! Several problems must be addressed, and that’s why I started this post. I don’t know if it is either a very stupid idea, or if it can be accomplished and become a cool project. I’m working on some solutions, and I really hope I can post something on the subject anytime soon. Why should I even try this? Because I really think this is a cool idea, and perhaps I will not achieve what I intend, but in the process of failing, lies a path of learning… get it? =)

Please feel free to drop comments on this subject, with suggestions, critics or your help for the project. I’m more than happy to welcome you aboard. Let’s get this one off the paper, and make it work!

This is how everything starts right? Officially, this is my first web post, on my brand new site! Hope I can share with you all the knowledge that everyday I try to expand, by reading books, blogs, sites, and of course, by talking with others. Everyone can share something, and everybody can teach you something new everyday! This is my small part on this world! So if you came across my website, and you enjoy technology has much has i do, you came to the right place! With time, i hope this can be a source off good information, so you keep coming back… Feel free to give opinions!

Enjoy! Marco Garcês