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Cloud Storage and Backups

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  Cloud Storage and Backups Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> - 2025-04-29 19:20 +0000
    Re: Cloud Storage and Backups John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2025-04-29 19:59 +0000
    Re: Cloud Storage and Backups Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2025-04-30 08:11 +0100
    Re: Cloud Storage and Backups Magnus <magnus@kalasarn.se> - 2026-06-23 08:42 +0000

#230728 — Cloud Storage and Backups

[Apologies for this article being off-topic due to not being about the
distant past. Is there a better USEnet space for this type of talk?]

ZDNET had an article today about "The best cloud storage services:
Expert tested". It seems that all of the services described are either
strictly for backup, or they implement "shared folders". While shared
folders are good for many use cases, and also provide backup for some
designated folders in your file system, I was a bit disappointed that
the 2-5 TB space offered by iDrive, OneDrive or iCloud seemingly cannot
be configured as a "remote NAS", that can be mounted as a drive to
Linux, Windows or Mac. Instead, they seem to communicate via proprietary
protocols with a provider-supplied sync application that runs on the
client.

I think my ideal cloud drive would have a client-end module that
presents to the OS as a block device (disk drive), wrapped in a container
file on the cloud end. You could then format the file system of your
choice, and the blocks would be encrypted/decrypted as they are shipped
to the cloud service, and the server would never have access to the
keys.

If nobody has built this yet, why is that?

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#230732

According to Lars Poulsen  <lars@beagle-ears.com>:
>ZDNET had an article today about "The best cloud storage services:
>Expert tested". It seems that all of the services described are either
>strictly for backup, or they implement "shared folders". ...

Yup, that's what they tested.  They're a consumer publication, they test
stuff consumers are likely to use.

>I think my ideal cloud drive would have a client-end module that
>presents to the OS as a block device (disk drive), wrapped in a container
>file on the cloud end. You could then format the file system of your
>choice, and the blocks would be encrypted/decrypted as they are shipped
>to the cloud service, and the server would never have access to the
>keys.

There are cloud NAS providers (try "cloud NAS" in a search engine.) If you
connect via iSCSI I'd think you could do your own encrypted file system,
although SMB or NFS is likely to be easier to set up.

Here's a few:

https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/cloud-nas
https://www.buurst.com/products/softnas/


Another that seems aimed at bigger customers:

https://solink.com/resources/nas-vs-cloud/

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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#230767

Lars Poulsen wrote:

> I was a bit disappointed that the 2-5 TB space offered by iDrive,
> OneDrive or iCloud seemingly cannot be configured as a "remote NAS",
> that can be mounted as a drive to Linux, Windows or Mac.

If you choose a cloud service that uses/emulates the "S3 protocol" 
(there are many of them) you can get software e.g. "S3 Drive" that does 
what you want for drive mappings.

I've used the free version for several years, it can't auto-start the 
drive mapping, and is limited to a single concurrent mapping, the paid 
version can do both (It has recently been transferred from "/n software" 
to "callback technologies")

<https://www.callback.com/s3drive>

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#235152

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:20:47 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

> I think my ideal cloud drive would have a client-end module that
> presents to the OS as a block device (disk drive), wrapped in a
> container file on the cloud end. You could then format the file system
> of your choice, and the blocks would be encrypted/decrypted as they are
> shipped to the cloud service, and the server would never have access to
> the keys.
> 
> If nobody has built this yet, why is that?

Rclone is a bit of a "swiss army knife" on Linux/BSD for this kind of 
thing. It has support for many object based services and can usually 
mount 
them as "file systems" with fuse. But that might be slow and sluggish if 
you expect to use it as a regular filesystem mounted all the time.

If you are concerned about encryption, my suggestion is to solve that 
locally and then move the encrypted files to the cloud-service.

The way I do it is I use restic locally, and then nightly do a copy of 
the 
restic repositories in it's encrypted state to two different cloud 
providers. That way, the working copy is locally stored, but in case of 
failure of that, I can get the data from one of the providers. Rclone 
works like rsync in this case, and you have control (responsibility) of 
the encryption-keys etc.

I guess it all depends on the kind of backup-scheme you use and how this 
all fits in with that.

Good luck!

/Magnus

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