OT: @Nat do you not have some minion you could get to resurect dashboard for you now your busy on other things ?

Plus, it seems like iFolder could use some good ideas and freshing IMHO.

I’ve thought about a Drobo. Right now I’m just running on cheap USB backups. I’ve been watching to see if someone would release a SOLR/Beagle/Tracker DroboApp that would do basic indexing and search, but the DroboApp lineup still seems pretty limited. You can get a Google appliance on eBay pretty cheap right now, actually, but I definitely don’t want a rack in my house. Drobo’s pretty, that’s a plus. But I hear it’s loud.

One thing I didn’t talk about in this post is the big reason that this is all hard to do in the cloud — which is that we’re generating data faster than we can upload it. Most people are still uploading at 800kbps. At that speed, it would take me months to sync all my data to the cloud. And growing all the time. I’ve taken to recording weekly diary entries in video, for example.

Putting all of my personal data in Google’s cloud is starting to freak me out too. The GDrive will make this even more all-encompassing.

The tension is convenience vs. privacy. And to date, convenience is winning out, in so many different domains. Credit cards trample on our privacy to an enormous extent, but they are so damned *convenient*, that we ignore this completely, and most people I know hardly ever carry cash anymore.

So maybe someone just needs to write and sell a really great DroboApp that does everything I described above. I’d pay richly for that. Although probably the DroboShare is too underpowered for this.

Even so, a HomeNAS with real functionality would be a killer product, IMHO.

And I can back up all my stuff by trickling encrypted chunks into usenet or some peer-to-peer network.

But, I’m also a bit skeptical (still) of hosted services, even ones hosted by Google. I had to upgrade my mail server and using Gmail was a strong candidate, but instead I decided to deploy Zimbra instead. When I lose data, I want it to be my own damn fault!

I have been gathering all my archive data onto a slowly growing Drobo. It would make sense for me to make a cloud backup of this. I don’t have global search, though, and nobody makes a personal search appliance — they are all very expensive devices or software from Google, Autonomy, FAST (now Microsoft) and so forth.

I’m going to say something terribly sacrilegious now — I’m starting to get scared of Google. Recent actions are very much out of the Microsoft playbook — we’re so big we can take a market, deploy a new product for free, and eliminate the competition. (Google Maps Navigator is the most recent, and significant, example.) So far they have not been “evil” towards the end user with this power, but it has the problem that it destroys innovation. When the only GPS nav is Google GPS nav, you get the features that Google wants to add, no more. While Google has an environment of “let’s keep adding neat stuff so we have better products that are more fun and effective to use even though we have a dominant market share”, Microsoft does not, and someday the Google attitude could shift…

… but until then, I’d really like Google Maps Navigator on my iPhone please.

The closest native tool on Gnome is Gnome Catalog but there is very little development and it is primitive.

It would be great if Tracker could be implemented or forked to keep indexes of “offline/removable” data.

Then be able to search all this just from the index file when the media itself is not plugged in.

S++