gDisk
gDisk is an Mac OS X application that lets you use your Gmail account as 2 GB of network storage. The Windows equivalent is here. The two apps use slightly different methods to store files; the Mac version saves your files as tagged ‘drafts’, but the Windows version saves your files as emails beginning with GMAILFS. Both are very fast and elegant.
I have 100 Gmail accounts to give away — that’s 200 GB — so if you need a couple GB of online storage space for anything, *anything at all*, let me know. I use a special Gmail account as a scripted automatic backup of this site, for example.
~jeff
October 14th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Roll this into an automated backup solution, and I’m sold.
October 14th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Now *that’s* a good idea; the source code is here and I’ll be checking it out this afternoon.
UPDATE: it would be insanely complicated; the engine for shuttling the files to and from Gmail is written in Python, and the Mac OS X interface code is Objective-C. I understand, like, 2% of those languages. It’s a wonderful idea, but I am too lazy to use this to do it.
Here’s a thought, though; since it’s an archival backup, maybe you don’t need the slickness of this particular utility. Maybe it would be enough to create an compressed archive of files that need to be backed up, email the contents of the archive as an attachment, and list the contents of the archive as the text of the email. That way, you use the Gmail interface to search for the file and then when you find the relevant version of the file, you just download that attachment? On the downside, Gmail attachments are cut off at 10 MB, so maybe it’s not the best solution ever.
October 14th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
I’ve been using the Windows version for a while now. It works very well. I can’t figure out anything to store besides porn. Now I have 1.5GB of porn available anywhere I can log in. Oh… dream of dreams.