Recently, I have been very unhappy with the direction Microsoft has been taking as a corporation, and with Windows. As a corporation, I’m seeing shades of the Microsoft of old emerging. I find their all-in attitude toward AI, and their penchant to integrate it into all the apps they include with their OS, very disturbing.
As far as I’m concerned, AI is a two-sided sword. On the positive side, it offers the potential to be a great boon to humanity. On the other hand, it poses an equally great danger/risk of being misused. The magnitude of risk equals that of benefit, so unless I have the option to completely disable it where I want to, I’d prefer that I not have it at all.
End Rant.
With all that said, I’ve been working to get all the necessary resources I use on Windows for my Solus Linux installation in preparation for dropping Windows altogether if things go as I fear they will. I have found that I can play three of the games I enjoy from the Microsoft store by accessing them on their web pages. I have also found GNU/Linux equivalents for the other games I enjoy. That takes care of my entertainment needs.
A Windows component I use extensively is OneDrive (which I also use on Solus, thanks to a OneDrive client I found on GitHub). Since I intend to cancel my Microsoft account when I drop Windows, I’ve been looking for a OneDrive replacement, and I think I’ve found it in Filen. I get 20GB data storage for free (ample for my current needs) with end-to-end encryption as their default, and the desktop app is an App image, so I can use it on any distribution. I’ve installed it on my primary laptop and my desktop PCs, and it’s syncing as I write this. If all goes well, I’ll opt for the Pro I paid subscription, and get 200GB for 1.99 euros per month. That’s currently about $2.14(US), and I’ll probably never need that much storage for my personal use.
It looks to me like you have things under control.
For the OneDrive replacement I’ve thought about just using some sort of S3 storage. There may not be a client for automatic syncing, but I think it’d be pretty cheap. I have seen utilities you can install on Linux that would mount an S3 bucket similar to an NFS share. That way you could use a standard rsync or another backup tool with that share as the target.
It wouldn’t have to come from AWS. There are other companies with S3 compatible storage. I have not really looked into what the pricing would be, but it sounds interesting.
Ernie, I get 50G for free with MEGA.nz. It also has a client that syncs data between the desktop and the MEGA storage. Filen seems adequate and inexpensive, but I’ve always been a fan of FREE! As long as you trust that the folks down under are reliable, you should check it out.
Thank you for your thoughts, Neville. I’ll keep them in mind as I work through this venture. Rest assured that I won’t make any permanent changes until I’ve tested that I have all my ducks in a row.
So far, everything works, including my Canon MX490 printer/scanner/fax machine. It’s a vintage business-oriented model, but it’s working fine, so I’ll stick with it 'til it doesn’t.
I’ll have to work on that (I don’t use spreadsheets much, but you never know when you’ll need to be able to). I have LibreOffice here, so I’ll probably use its spreadsheet app when/if I need it,
I’ve already got one, but I plan to keep Windows 11 installed and updated for several months until I’m satisfied that I no longer need it before removing it permanently.
Not yet. I use Macrium Reflect for that. I’ll be looking into GNU/Linux-compatible alternatives, going forward.
Any data I don’t want to lose is stored on OneDrive for now. My local sync directory is where I access and work with it. It’s easily and efficiently available, and automatically synchronized with my cloud-based storage every five minutes (or when I manually sync). I’m looking for the same basic functionality with whichever GNU/Linux-compatible solution I decide to go with, so it’ll already be on EXT4, locally.
That sounds interesting, but the thing is, I’m not looking for a data backup solution as much as I’m looking to keep my data available and synchronized on all my computers without the need to do anything after I get things set up correctly. A side effect of using cloud storage is that my data’s also stored off-site, so I suppose it contributes to a good back up regimen, even though that’s not my primary motivation. When I start my backup solution research, I’ll probably try to find something that works like Macrium Reflect because I like how it works. I certainly do wish they offered a GNU/Linux client
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service on AWS. It’s read-write storage. They normally refer to this as object storage or blob storage. AWS, Azure, and GCP all offer something like it. There are other providers with S3 compatible storage too.
You could mount it remotely as a directory and just use it. Assuming you have a reliable, high speed internet connection. If you don’t, you could work locally and sync to the share. It could be mounted on more than one computer and use the same files too. Have your files available from any computer in the house or at work. Might not be something to do from mobile.
I went to the Mega website, and there’s a button to sign up for 20GB for free. How do you end up with 50GB for free? I may give them a try if what you say is currently accurate for new users.
@ernie I, too, have been using Mega (though I am ending it since my home server will be doing the work). If I remember correctly, I made a free account first. Then they offered me an extra 10 or 20 gb if I referred someones. So I made my mom an account and they gave us both the extra 20 gb. From there I think they offered additional 10 gb if you installed on Android. So we ended up with 50 gb free; however, that was not enough for my business and personal storage. So I have been paying $130/yr for 2 TB, which is way more than I need. But as I said, I will end my annual subscription this month.
I will say I have used support a few times and they were great.
Thank you for your response, Sheila. After posting my question to @Bill Berninghausen about how he ended up with 50GB free storage on Mega, I decided to give it a try. After all, it starts out with the same 20GB I get free with Filen, and I’ve been hearing it gets good/positive ratings/comments overall. I don’t know whether the FlatHub package is developed by Mega or some third party, but it works very well. I was very impressed that it took between a quarter and a half hour to upload all the files I currently store on OneDrive, while Filen took over an hour. Since the two uploads occurred at significantly different times of the day, I can’t make a fair judgement/comparison about the relative speeds of the two services. All I can say is I’m very impressed with Mega overall, and I’ve decided to choose them to replace OneDrive when/if I drop Windows.
Now my next bit of research will be to decide what to do about replacing Macrium Reflect. Any suggestions?
Foxclone sounds O.K. as far as it goes, but what I want is a desktop backup utility to replace Macrium. A bootable USB stick is fine for recovery purposes, but what about automated image backups produced on a schedule? That’s what I have with Macrium, and that’s what I want to replace. Do you (or does anyone reading this) have any suggestions?
Update:
I noticed that MegaSync doesn’t start when I log in, even though I’ve enabled (check-marked) that setting. I solved the issue by adding it to the Auto-start list in KDE settings - Startup & shutdown - Autostart - Add (+) application.
Interestingly enough, Vorta has the same setting, and it works as expected. I suspect the difference is that Vorta is installed system wide, and I installed the Mega flatpack without sudo. I may have to look into that.
My understanding of S3 - is it’s for “near line” storage - but not ideal for read write - but it’s something like 8 copies of every bit you write - replicated to multiple Amazon “Availability Zones”… e.g. something knocks out a whole city/region hosting 2-3 Amazon AWS - there’s still 7 other copies across the planet. It’s probably a LOT more than 8 copies these days (my info about 8 instances - is probably 10 years out of date).
Dropbox actually lives on S3 I believe - i.e. Dropbox pay AWS for the S3 backend they use… So - your data’s probably safe…
If you want faster read write - e.g. on an EC2 (virtual machine) instance in AWS - you probably wouldn’t use S3, but EBS (block) or EFS (file / NAS)…
Remember neither RAID nor Cloud Storage are backups…
Some big AWS shops (i.e. companies that use AWS) do stuff like - backup their block storage systems to S3 - then after that it can go to something called Glacier - it’s like the old tape storage backup solutions (many companies are still using tape) - S3 is the “near line” tape storage, Glacier is like when you send the tapes offsite…
I was wondering if you had to do something to get from 20 to 50GB, like I see in other areas because after installing their flathub desktop app, my limit was increased from 20GB to 25.
The last I read an S3 bucket has data copied to three AZs (availability zones) by default. There is a new storage class called S3 Express One Zone. They describe it as high-performance, single zone storage.
But my point was just to use S3 as a backup. Isn’t that what OneDrive or GoogleDrive is? You wouldn’t normally mount it and use it as you would a local drive. I did say you can mount an S3 bucket so that you can treat it more like a normal drive. Then just use it as a spot to backup to.
Maybe ~/Documents could be copied to ~/s3 using rsync or another tool. Where the s3 directory is really a mount to the S3 bucket. That way you have an offsite backup. Treat it like a huge, offsite USB drive.
Glacier is a storage class for S3 files where you don’t expect to need access to the file very often. They probably end up using some sort of offline storage for that because it will take time (hours) to retrieve if you request it.
I’m getting some deja vu from this. Has this been discussed here before?
Ernie, your First distro has to be Slackesre bc as has been said for decades abt it, when you learn Redhat, Ubuntu, etc, you only know those distos. When you learn Slackware, you KNOW Linux/Unix!!! Enjoy
