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Differences between a "seedbox" and a "transfer box" ... and feature requests ?
rsync_dot_net
Member, Host Rep
We[1] are very cautiously interested in positioning ourselves as a provider of "transfer boxes" or "transfer hosts" - which were not on my radar screen until I began reading LET.
I think we are not a "seedbox" because we don't have a bittorrent client in our environment and we won't be adding one ... so you can't literally seed from us.
But we do let you run 'rclone' remotely, over SSH, like this:
ssh [email protected] rclone s3:/blah/bucket dir/in/rsync.net/account
So that would make us a "transfer box", correct ?
How useful/interesting is that ?
What would make it more useful or interesting ?
Given that our accounts come with unlimited transfer/bandwidth, what kind of users would end up hogging/abusing that ? Of course I know how someone seeding BT would hog it, but you can't run a torrent here so ... what's the worst use-case scenario ? Who will we see burning through our traffic ?[2]
Do you care if the account is snapshotted[3] ? If you're just ferrying data through the account then I am not sure if the daily snapshots really matter ...
What feature requests would you submit to us ? What could we implement that would be interesting to you ?
Thanks.
[1] rsync.net
[2] We have 10gb links from he.net ... but nothing is infinite ...
Comments
Are you trying to replicate (no pun intended) the service s3rsync.com offers? i.e., rsync/rclone to s3?
I respect you as an individual and a honest and reputable company enough to tell you that you probably want to be very selective on who you pick as customers from LET and to just absolutely say fuck no to people trying to do anything even slightly related to those two things.
This is not going to end well.
I had not heard of s3rsync until just now ... I think this is a bit different because it is specifically tied to the Amazon cloud (and specifically to S3) whereas running arbitrary rclone commands allows the use of any storage interface ...
I will say that I've been doing this a long, long time and I have never seen anything like the "rsync hours" pricing model that they have:
"You will be asked to pay in advance 19 US$ that will credit you with 380 usage hours."
Fascinating ...
Thank you - appreciated. I wonder, though, can you elaborate ? Even if I go nowhere with this I would be very interested to have a good understanding of the (ab)use-cases here.
In my mind, if you're transferring between two clouds (say, S3 and gdrive) then you have an account at each of those and each of those charge much more than we do for transfer, so ... the more you beat rsync.net up the more it costs you, twice over ...
On the other hand, if you're cold-storing data from some rclone-supported endpoint (like your gdrive account or "Google Photos" for your own use, then you're eating up storage at rsync.net which is what we want you to do ...
Please do elaborate if you can ...
EDIT: also, just to be clear, while I am asking here in the LET community for comments and/or feature requests, this is a mass market product offering - not something specifically for LET users...
Does seeding torrents from an rclone mounted drive work?
What's the use case for being able to rclone s3 to rsync.net? I do own accounts on both but now a day, I just rclone it to bb as cold storage for back up.
Do you know of the rclone utility ? It lets you transfer between cloud endpoints.
So, from your local system you might move your S3 bucket to your google drive:
... and that doesn't involve your local connection or bandwidth at all.
As for rsync.net, we installed rclone inside of our cloud storage platform so you don't even need to install or run rclone locally - you can just execute it over SSH:
So there is nothing special about an S3 use-case, it's just a familiar example.
I think there are plenty of people that need, from time to time, to either backup some cloud data to a central spot (perhaps rsync.net) or need to move data from one cloud to another and don't want to download it all and then turn around and upload it all again.
Interesting but whether I have any use for such service depends on its cost vs my bandwidth cost. what endpoint/services do you plant to support?
The endpoints we support are whatever endpoints rclone supports:
https://rclone.org/
... let me know if I misunderstood your question ...
In most cases, depending on the endpoints, it certainly does. Which is also why you offering this service would be useful, i.e. to take the local connection out of the equation and use your fat pipe to do the transfer.
I think this is interesting and would love to see you offer this. I'm not currently a customer but have been attracted by your offerings and attitude in the past, so I'll offer a few thoughts:
In case you don't know, people take advantage of unlimited Google Drive to hoard massive amounts of data for personal use. Judging by /r/DataHoarder, it's mostly pirated media. Some actually pay Google $10 a month for it, some use accounts from their university days, some buy ToS-breaking accounts from eBay. These routinely get shut down by Google, which is why people sometimes buy two or three.
These are the people you should consider the extreme use cases. Some guy who paid $20 for three unlimited accounts will happily use your service to transfer 50TB of shitty movies between them, multiple times. One account gets shut down? Just buy another one, cue up another transfer. If you offer unlimited traffic at a price that is competitive, expect freeloaders to fully take advantage.
Having said that, with reasonable traffic limits, I don't see what would be so bad about this for you. I would certainly find it useful. I have several backup servers along with accounts at various cloud providers and would love a centralized place to orchestrate transfer jobs between them, both scheduled syncs and the occasional bigger one-offs.
Perhaps you could set up limits that are burstable based on a time frame (averages) or an extra fee. I'd personally like to see a longer window than the standard one month to cover some more rare peaks. Instead of 3TB of transfer in a month I'd love to see 10TB per 90 days, or something like that.
Let me know if you need beta testers!
did you consider adding an interface like https://github.com/rclone/rclone-webui-react
I lurk in /r/datahoarders and have a sense of this.
In our case, it seems to not be an issue because we don't offer unlimited storage ... we want you to store as much as possible and the more you store, the more you're paying.
I think that would position it more as a personal safe-deposit box for your most important and serious cloud data (photos, documents, etc.) and not as a movie dumping ground. But if you did, that would be fine -
My thinking is that we filter a lot of bullshit by not having a GUI. Figuring out the command line invocations of rclone is a "must be this tall to ride" sign ...
Right. But I thought you specifically wanted feedback on a "transfer box"? So if you offer that, without restrictions, you can expect people to use it as I outlined, which I imagine would be an issue.
What do people use "transfer boxes" for ? I have a sense, but some concrete examples would be very helpful.
I know someone who sets up a daily cron for rclone sync between 5 different gsuite accounts.
I suppose that could be a potential usecase.. not sure if that’s the target crowd you’d want.
Is that shuffling around big storage for movies and so on, or is that actual business data like gsuite expects you to use ? Just curious ...
my educated guess is that large part of that is not business data. And not even own photos or own birthday movies. For those a b2/glacier/ovh cloud archive account is enough. No need to move data around every day.
Do you have any sense as to what that rclone box he set up costs on a monthly basis ?
He runs it from a feralhosting slot https://www.feralhosting.com/pricing