Saturday, July 06, 2013

Looking for a backup system (maybe)

I have many static files that I care about, e.g. photos, downloaded media, media that I've ripped, archives of old email, important documents. They are mostly mirrored on 2 disks but it's a bit of a mess. For some I do extra backing up, e.g. photos are supposed to end up in the cloud too. A few other things are backed up to a virtual server but that's even less systematic. Some things are over-backed up, they exist in a RAID and also on my media player disk and on a physical DVD. That's a waste of space. I don't want to have to think about any of this (at least not more than once - at the time I decide I want to be careful about a file).

I'm not trying to solve the general backup problem, this is pretty much for files that do not change once written (although their metadata or importance may change).

I want to be able to do something like

absorb --tag personal-documents --delete-when-safe tax-return-2013.pdf
and in a few seconds, there's a RAIDed copy on my home server and a copy in Google drive, another in Dropbox and that working copy is gone, not cluttering up my laptop anymore.

Does this exist already? It's not just backup, it's part "document management" and there's lots of stuff I'd like to be able to do with tagging, managing, presenting, sharing but I'd settle for a partial solution that I don't have write myself for now. I can't find anything suitable but thought I'd ask before putting any effort in.