Unfortunately, this kind of service isn’ t free, and the cost can be a barrier. However, there is a cost-effective way to store your cloud backups: Usenet. With access to a Usenet news server, you can simply upload your backup there, and it will be stored redundantly in news servers all over the world. Best of all, this approach typically costs considerably less than a cloud backup service.
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Obviously, this is not your typical method of cloud storage. Many may snicker or find it plain weird to tap into this vintage part of the Internet in such a modern way. But oddly enough, we have experience experimenting with this alternative offline storage when it comes to backing up a Linux system. And backing up your Linux system to usenet ultimately requires only a handful of steps. It’s not only possible – it’s scriptable, too.
I didn’t know this was possible, but that’s mostly because I never thought of it. Clever.
If thousands of people started doing this, I reckon it would not only jack up the prices of Usenet, but also make it harder for Usenet providers to retain the years of retention that they’re currently up to.
This.
This is not what Usenet is intended for and borders on abuse of service.
As with anything else – it depends. Someone backing up a few hundred megs every month or two is far less abuse of usenet than someone posting gigs of video each and every day, and there are FAR more of the latter than the former.
You’re wrong on this.
Usenet is a tool for exchanging information and data that’s valuable to others.
Using it for piracy surely can be considered as an abuse, but using it for storing private data that no one else cares about is a FAR greater abuse, on a whole new plan. It’s just plain wrong.
Oh, and yes, abusing a system in a way that, were you to succeed in doing this, would basically destroy it, is anything but clever.
That’s pretty much what Usenet is these days though – the pirate bay for smart people. If pirates stopped using the service, I reckon most Usenet providers would be out of business in about a week …
Instead of the bold and the beautiful, Usenet is for the smart and paranoid.
I am still sad that it isn’t provided as a standard service by ISPs anymore.. remember those days?
As a matter of fact, I do. Although I recall ISP-provided Usenet being vastly inferior to what you could get with a dedicated provider. Once it started being a haven for piracy, it would pretty much game over for free Usenet.
Plus that binary newsgroups were already not archived by most news-servers simply because they had too much bandwidth.
I am a regular and long term user of several usenet groups that have been all but destroyed by people posting a huge number of encrypted data archives. Its a very antisocial and destructive practice. Unfortunately I can’t see any way to stop this from happening.
Eventually, this will be we can’t have nice things.
Who would put his private data in a place where everybody can see it.
It’d be fine if you encrypted any private data first. You could even be fancy about it and use steganography, too.
Using steganography for backups does not look like a good idea, due to overhead. Unless, of course, you have no more than a few bytes of data to backup.
lol really? Just because something is encrypted doesn’t mean I can publicly post the files for anyone to download.
How long is the retention on usenet these days? 10 years? Who can guarantee me that after 10 years my encryption is still save and not cracked yet? Would you take that risk knowing that all your files are out there for anyone to grab?
This is a very bad idea, very irresponsible. Unless you don’t care about the type of data and/or if anyone reads it I would NOT recommend this. Please pay a few more bucks for a cloud service…
Ha, I was thinking the same thing. While Usenet and pirate sites I believe are a valid ‘cloud back up’ of software that you may have purchased, and either the drm no longer works on modern operating systems, or you have somehow lost a serial number, or even an easier method of getting rips of shows you have bought, but want on a media center. Try ripping all 11 seasons of supernatural, and you’ll realize it is simpler just to torrent the crap.
But uploading private data to usenet? It isn’t like there aren’t tools to decrypt that. This sounds really foolish.
This is an old idea actually. It was the original idea of cloud storage. Put things into “the cloud” that way they would never be forgotten. Since then “cloud” has been abused an now means mainfraimes instead of the shifting unreliable nature it original had.
…ruin Usenet for everyone just so you can store some backups? Wow, good job dickhead.