Backups in the cloud.

Given that 1TB of backup from Google is now 10$ a month, I had to look into doing cloud backups again.

Google doesn't have a native Linux client. So one has to use google-drive-ocamlfuse. Installing this on CentOS 6 is surprisingly complex. And Google Drive's auth mechanism is based around a web interface.

But once I got it working, it Just Worked. Or rather, I could copy small files to ~/googledrive, see them via the web interface, delete them there and they are now missing.

Of course you wouldn't leave unencrypted backups on Google's servers. I futzed around with gpg a bit, but maybe layering encfs on top of google-drive-ocamlfuse would be a better idea.

My experimetation was cut short by supper, and by the fact that uploading a 400MB file was very slow :-) (sent 418536429 bytes received 31 bytes 219416.23 bytes/sec aka 1.6 Mbit/S)

For the record, here is how I installed google-drive-ocamlfuse

yum install m4 libcurl-devel fuse-devel sqlite-devel zlib-devel \
    libzip-devel openssl-devel
curl -kL https://raw.github.com/hcarty/ocamlbrew/master/ocamlbrew-install \
    | env OCAMLBREW_FLAGS="-r" bash
source /home/fil/ocamlbrew/ocaml-4.01.0/etc/ocamlbrew.bashrc
opam init
eval `opam config env --root=/home/fil/ocamlbrew/ocaml-4.01.0/.opam`
opam install google-drive-ocamlfuse
sudo usermod -a -G fuse fil
google-drive-ocamlfuse 
google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/googledrive

The second to last command will open a browser to get an OAuth token. This means you need htmlview and a valid DISPLAY. The token is only good for 30 days. This is something that needs to be better automated.