[ExI] Backing up the Cloud

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:43 AM, Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, I think it's an idea that could work, commercially even.

There's already a few sites that allow you to interface with a lot of
different websites and steal their information. They are generally
frowned upon by the websites that are being crawled of course, but
whatever. There's generally two ways of doing this. You could have a
backend crawler on your own servers for each of your users, thus most
of your requests either coming from stolen randomized IP addresses or
your own, the latter of which will become quickly blocked; the other
option is to go all out with the "web 2.0" nonsense and do some fancy
userscripts and firefox extensions (and the like) to automatically
pull data that the user comes across in his daily browsing, or all at
once if necessary. This way, the content can be pulled only once [[not
that these services are lacking bandwidth (okay, except twitter)]].
Anyway, it's being done. I'd recommend looking into the twitter and
facebook CLI packages, and maybe prod me to go hunt down those links
to some services doing this. The name of them escape me because I
cared so little at the time. Please also consider the reverse
direction; I have many hundreds of gigabytes, perhaps terabytes, of
archived and personal data all locally stored. Yes, I can and do
backup more redundantly than just locally, but it would be interesting
to consider the reverse direction, i.e. how to publish multiple
gigabytes from my own sources. In the case of "web 2.0" website from
one to the other, there's a few synchronization and following
services, but that's already preformattted data ready to be slurped up
by those socially-inclined-websites, not just raw HTML, PDF, etc. that
one might have laying around and of relevance to various social groups
connected over the servers you're talking about, Emlyn.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/