1. Summary
There are 4 data services that are either available for you now or that you can try on an informal basis, albeit with limited support.
2. UCLA’s CASS storage
Summary: Highly reliable storage at a fairly high price. Is hosted in a Data Center on a fast network and can be shared via Globus easily.
UCLA is offering rental access to its Cloud Archival Storage Service (CASS), a very large storage service housed in a data center.
2.1. Cost.
The storage is not free, currently $122 to $172/TB/yr, depending on space requirements and service period commitment. As a comparison, a 1TB USB disk (w/ a 1yr warranty) from Newegg costs about $60. These are not strictly comparable in terms of reliability, but for the entry price, you could buy 2 of these disks.
2.2. NFS.
CASS can supply read/write data to users outside of UCLA only via the Network File System (NFS), which is really only well-supported on Linux, not so well on on Macs (possible) or Windows (possible, but unpleasant and expensive). This service allows high bandwidth (40-100MB/s to CASS) but also high latency, so it’s good for storing large files, but not for manipulating lots of small files. However, you have to conform to its UID scheme which will require you to change your local UID or create another user with the CASS UID.
2.3. CrashPlan.
You can purchase a CrashPlan server license ($36/yr) which allows you to use the well-regarded CrashPlan software to back up your devices to CASS. Alternatively, you can use the free CrashPlan client to back up to that USB disk (one in your office, one at home).
2.4. Globus Online.
You can also transfer files to and from CASS via the Globus Online system, a browser-based high-speed file transfer system. This also allows the data stored at CASS to be available to other Globus endpoints at fairly high speed if you need to share large data at high speed.
3. Google Drive
Summary: Google drive provides an enormous but slow sync service for UCI students, staff, and faculty. It provides ONLY sync services on Windows, but can be coerced to provide actual online storage for MacOSX and Linux.
As part of UCI’s agreement with Google to provide students with Google Apps and Gmail, Google has agreed to provide students, staff and faculty with unlimited (or 10TB, depending on which document you believe) of free sync storage. Via Google’s native MacOSX and Windows clients, this implies that you have to have 10TB of local storage to make use of the 10TB of Google Drive space, which few ppl will. However, using the fuse adapter from the GDriveFS project, Linux users can effectively mount their own Google Drive allocations as a filesystem to provide 10TB of additional file space.
This document shows how to set up the administrative side on Linux and can be adapted by wizard-level Mac users to do the same on MacOSX.
This document describes the user-level commands on Linux.
This approach allows the Google Drive to be used as a file store, not only a file sync. ie: the files can exist ONLY on Google Drive, not on both Drive AND on your own computer. The speed at which data can move back and forth to this service is fairly low (3-5MB/s, much less than the bandwidth to the UCLA CASS system (40-100MB/s) mentioned above), thereby limiting the effectiveness of the service. However it is an enormous allocation of space, so UCI users have reason to check this out in all its forms.
4. OwnCloud on Campus
Summary: OwnCloud is a local, easy-to-use DropBox work-alike, which has wide platform support and a much higher storage capacity than WebFiles. We are looking for users to use and stress it.
I have installed a local instance of OwnCloud, which represents itself as a sync&share service sort of like a Personal DropBox, with native clients for MacOSX, IOS, Windows, Linux, and Android. We currently have about 30 users on it and it seems to be working reasonably well. If, after reading about its pros (and some cons) here, you would like to try it, please let me know. Since it is on campus and is on a Gbs network, local access is fast.
5. BitTorrent sync
Summary: a BitTorrent (peer-to-peer) client designed for syncing your files to whichever and however many devices you have.
Aka btsync, this software is available for free or as a Pro service that costs $ for for some additional features. The advantage of this software is that it enables a peer-to-peer service so that there is no dependence on other companies' servers and restrictions. Since you are file-sharing (in a good way) from peer to peer, there are no limitations as to size of files and setup (besides the client, which is available for all major platforms: MacOSX, Windows, Linux, Android IOS).
Dr. Cristina Lopes of ICS has written an excellent description of academic file sharing and why the usual administrative solutions do not work well. She also describes the mechanism that she used to set up her own system using btsync as a core technology. Read it here.
If you would like to experiment with btsync, we will be happy to assist you, using a Linux client as one side of the sync. You are welcome to use whatever client you wish for the other side of the sync and you are not required to use the Linux client - since btsync is a p2p technology, you can use any platform as both a client and a server. We strongly encourage you to read Dr. Lopes' document above to see how such a system works.