I never said it's the best solution. I only brought gmail into discussion because you could in theory backup an unlimited amount of data which is what amazon allows you to do. It would be unfair to compare a solution that lacks in space (for free).

I have 3 sites currently being backed up to gmail but all 3 of them are ridiculously small and it's nothing more than a 40k-150k file being backed up daily. I should add that only 2 of those sites are being backed up daily.

The third site doesn't really change but it dumps results of a query. Rather than write this to disk and keep it there forever, I just have it e-mail the data.

I don't backup my music and family photos and documents online. I'd rather buy a $5 flash drive and keep that stuff local.

I upgrade my computer every 6-7 years usually too, and by the time I upgrade it I usually retire my old hard drives. I put them into storage and whatever data is on there is left there.

Also I don't backup music because I stream everything on Youtube.

I don't backup movies because I stopped buying DVDs half a decade ago. I just stream and rent movies from Netflix (if you don't believe me for some reason go look at my posts in the 23423234243 page Netflix thread in OOT).

Also I'm not an artist so I don't create large images that need to be archived. I'm also not "that guy" who takes family photos at every event. I have a small amount of photos and random videos (less than 10 gigs) and those are happily tucked away on flash drives or old HDs along with a truck load of documents but those take up almost no space.

That slashdot article about the dude working at Google that was looking at suicides, beheadings, disturbing porn and so forth to filter it out was somewhat disturbing.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-...ooks-at-the-wo

Totally not evil though...

Shoe, that post was reasonable.

Stripe have organised a 'Capture the Flag' contest. Basically, you are presented with a series of mock web applications and you have to hack each one to proceed to the next.

https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-20

some folks at work were doing this today. sounded like fun but i didn't have the bandwidth/energy for it.

One of the guys on our team gave his notice today. Hurray double work load!

More evidence of how completely f'ing awesome Stripe is.

That looks like fun. How hard is it to get the T-Shirt?

Wouldn't that be perfect interviewing attire? If the company doesn't recognize it, they aren't worthy of your prowess. If they do recognize it, you start the next day.

Gmail is totally bloated. You should write your own email server with a web front end so you can use it for managing your backup storage.

I can verify this, having worked on one of Google's fraud teams, which included detection of linked accounts. We shut down people for less than this. I'm sure Google would have no problem with shutting down sharded accounts being used to avoid quota issues, if anyone ever bothered looking at it, and you'd have pretty much no recourse.

I mean, I think it's probably like 95% likely that nothing would happen even if you were maxing out 10 accounts, because frankly nobody's going to care about small time stuff like that, but who goes looking for backup solutions with 5% failure rates?

Plus, sometimes you'd get caught as collateral damage when the fraud team is going after bigger fish - I once shut down some poor college student in the UK who was probably defrauding Google for something like $5/hr, mostly because the stuff we developed to catch a larger fraudster just happened to get him as well. I felt kind of bad for the guy, who seemed to be doing the entire process by hand instead of scripting anything, and all for less than minimum wage.

lol

hate you wooster, i just burned like 3+ hours on this already:

Nice work!

Wow, thats pretty good. Struggling to get past the first couple

Better go for the t-shirt now... otherwise those 3 hours really will be wasted

I'm thinking about setting up a blog to record my random musings. Anything wrong with WordPress+Amazon?

Obviously I'd prefer some Python based blog and maybe Amazon is completely wrong for this but at the end of the day I don't think I'll tinker with the blog itself all that much so WordPress should be okish, right (yuk PHP though)

Edit: actually I tihnk I'll just pick the supereasy route and get some 1&1 hosting with Wordpress thingy

what do you plan on using amazon for?

Dont use wordpress. Its very convoluted, I dont like the interface, and your blog wont stand out at all.

Why not use something like GitHub to host your blog for free... (you can even use your own domain)

http://pages.github.com/

Too late already ordered a 1and1 hosting thingy + domainname. I have heard some not so great things about 1and1 regarding domain names but them's the breaks.
I see you can install WordPress via a one click installer, just have to wait for the domain to get done.
Seems fairly cheap and worryless for me.

This is the enduser version, if I had decidd on Amazon it would have mostly been to tinker with the Amazon platform itself and so forth (while using it for blogging ont he side)

It'll just be a simple "keep track of the stuff I do" mixture of IT/academics blog. I'll post ITT once it's set up and I have made my first post (assuming this is not forbidden). Mostly I need some people to tell me ZOMG WTF NO POST RLY YOU LAZY BUM every now and then :P

What does using Wordpress have to do with standing out?

Just a personal thing, but I tend to cringe whenever I read an article posted on a blog using one of the default wordpress themes.

Ah. Well who uses default themes who'd be posting here?

good luck, should be easy to get up and running. give the domain a day or two to percolate throughout the web

Talked to a coworker the other day and he expressed some concern about his backup strategy being external HDD next to the desktop (i.e. fire=both gone). We were discussing it a bit and I rememberd that there was some exercise on estimating in one of the books I read (pretty sure it was Pragmatic Programmer) which would probably be a fun little job interview question (one of those estimate stuff ones).

You have two options to back up your data (currently 300GB). Option "a" is backing it up to an external HD and carrying it where you want and option "b" is a backup over the internet.
Discuss the pros and cons of both alternatives.

Agreed. I would argue however that the effort required to put together a decent custom WP theme could be put to better use setting up a more innovative blogging platform.