Month: April 2017

OwnCloud – its awesome!

I gave up on SpiderOak in the end, it was too resource heavy for my laptops, their batteries were really struggling. The constant encrypting and decrypting was too much. Its a shame because as a backup system for large amounts of data it was really very good. Especially if that data was on desktops or didn’t change much. I couldn’t justify keeping it for this use only, too expensive at $25 a month (which is about £20 now!). So I looked back into OwnCloud.

I tried OwnCloud a number of years ago as I run my own home server anyway. Back then the desktop sync client was just not up to the job. It would take forever to sort out changes and sync them, often using up entire CPU cores on both the server and the client machines. I am pleased to say that problem as been solved and now OwnCloud is a great choice if you are running your own server somewhere anyway. The sync seems to be fast, and the setup is easy. I am using a self-signed SSL certificate, which doesn’t cause much in the way of annoying warnings. OwnCloud has the other obvious advantage that you can really limit the access to the data, and it supports encryption of the data on the server too. Or you can encrypt the drives etc. I have been using it for about 4 months without problem. The only issue I had was when there was a power cut in my house while I was away. Doh! This killed the server obviously.

The downside of course is that with SpiderOak I had a ‘cloud’ copy of all my important data that was at a different location to my house. This is no longer the case. I don’t use OwnCloud to sync all the large data-sets across my computers, I sync those with Unison instead. So to avoid a catastrophic data loss in the event of disaster I have synced all my important data and docs to my office computer using Unison. This is about 1.7TB of data onto a 5TB raid array. The first sync took ages but as this data doesn’t change very much. I also use Amazon Glacier for data that can be essentially archived off and forgotten about, its super cheap.

Let’s Encrypt!

I had to do it eventually. My security expert credentials (such as they are) were coming under question from my lack of https on my web server. This was partly due to that until recently it would have required additional expense, as additional IPs would been needed and also SSL certificates. Not so anymore! Let’s Encrypt is a great service where you can get free SSL certificates for your website, although I highly recommend giving a small donation if you are able. At this point I would normally write a blog post detailing how I setup the service for my server and websites. However as I run my server on Bytemark’s Symbiosis I didn’t have to do anything other than turn it on. All config done automatically, I did add a file named ‘ssl-only’ to the ‘config’ dir of my hosts to ensure that all traffic is redirected to https. I would have done it sooner but I needed to upgrade the OS on my server and in order to do that I needed to check backups and all that stuff that you should do anyway.