[Box Backup] OT: Server colocation

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Wout,

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, Wout Mertens wrote:

> Obligatory on-topic comment: Maybe boxbackup could be changed so all you 
> need is an S3 account and the boxbackup client instead of a server.
>
> I'm serious. What do you think? Can the boxbackup protocol be changed so 
> all you need is SOAP or HTTP? I'm thinking yes...

I have definitely considered this. The main problem is that at the moment, 
for efficiency, the Box client-server protocol has some special commands, 
for example the ability to get the server to send only parts of files, or
to mark them as deleted for cleanup by housekeeping. We might want to add 
more in future, such as getting the server to compute checksums of 
encrypted blocks and return them together with the IVs. I assume that 
Amazon S3 has no such facilities, so it might be less efficient.

But I would like to decouple the file-encryption part from the 
client-server part, for example to allow backing up to remote DAV/FTP/SFTP 
servers and local block devices.

Too many ideas, too little time and skill (on my part) ;-)

Cheers, Chris.
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