Sonic.net

It looks like Sonic shell accounts currently have a quota around 4 Gig? Is there any way
to increase this?

I'm thinking of a backup solution for our photo library ~100 Gigs worth. Debating
on whether it's worth it to invest on some hardware, or just depend on others storage.

I'm not interested in other "cloud" solutions - I find the interfaces clunky -
I'm thinking of a rsync/sshfs/truecrypt solution that would only require the raw storage
on Sonic's end. It'd just look like one big file in one of my directories.

Yes, the initial sync may require a bit of upload time. The incrementals will be much smaller.

One of the Lab forums posts talked about offering Backup solutions. So I'm not thinking
I'm too far out in left field asking...

To answer directly, no. We have been playing around with some "cloud" storage services that we could offer our customers and have explicitly discussed allowing rsync and sftp support along with webdav along with a web based file manager gui but don't have an ETA.

gtwrek wrote:I'm thinking of a backup solution for our photo library ~100 Gigs worth. Debating
on whether it's worth it to invest on some hardware, or just depend on others storage.

In addition to the disk quota issue, and depending on how valuable your photos are and your level of paranoia,
you also might want to consider how secure Sonic's shell host is. It's running a very old version of Linux
(Red Hat Linux release 7.3), a 2.4 kernel built over 3 years ago, and a glibc over 6 years old. It doesn't look
like the shell system is getting active maintenance, which probably means it has some serious security
vulnerabilities.

It'd be very secure, as it just be one very large file on Sonic's end. It'd be an encrypted Truecrypt partition. The raw data is
useless to anyone else. The far end data is secure (truecrypt), and the transport is secure (ssh). At no point in the chain is the raw data available other than on my home computer. I'm no security export, but this is good enough for me.

That's one of the reasons I like this solution over other cloud solutions. It just requires sshd on sonic's end (which
they already have) and disk space. I control everything else - including the data security.

I'm already using this solution for smaller backups. I'd be great to have it available for the larger stuff. Sounds like it's
not going to happen.

--Mark

Answering myself here, but an option I have is to sign up for a Basic Hosting Service from Sonic. That gives you 15 Gigs at $19.95/month. A little steep, and I don't need really need hosting, nor MySQL databases, nor cgi, ftp etc, etc..

What happens on these accounts if you go over your disk space quota? What are the rates per GB?

Thanks,

Mark

If this is a standard(ish) unix disk quota (which I presume it is, my shell account is not currently enabled, so I can't check) , you are prevented from going over quota; you will simply not be able to save that many bytes to your home directory.

gtwrek wrote:Answering myself here, but an option I have is to sign up for a Basic Hosting Service from Sonic. That gives you 15 Gigs at $19.95/month. A little steep, and I don't need really need hosting, nor MySQL databases, nor cgi, ftp etc, etc..

What happens on these accounts if you go over your disk space quota? What are the rates per GB?

Overuse is billed at $10 per month per 250MB. Yes, this price is intended to discourage customers from exceeding their quotas. https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/Quotas

Regarding the hard cap in the file system, this varies depending on whether you're talking about your mail spool, home directory, web directory, etc. The home and web directories are capped at 20GB by default.

I'd also note that web and shell storage is high-availability enterprise NAS storage - so if you don't intend to use the web space for web serving, we'd really discourage that use. There are much less expensive solutions for backup, for example Crashplan, or Carbonite, etc.