I’ve wanted to find a good provider of cheap and secure cloud backups for a while.
I’ve compared some cloud drive providers, but didn’t quite like those. They
usually have very limited free plans, somewhat pricey paid plans (e.g. 50GB for
about 24$ a year for OneDrive), or like in the case of Google no information
available at all. By the way, “Google one is coming soon” isn’t an announcement
that I want to look at for more than a few days when looking for pricing info.
Then, I’ve looked at pricing of cloud storage providers, such as AWS, Azure and
Google Cloud. Those offer storage around 1 cent ($0.01) per GB per month. That’s
a quarter of the OneDrive cost! It’s even less if you consider their archive
offerings (AWS Glacier, Archive in Azure, Coldline Storage for Google). The
cheapest offering here is from Microsoft at 0.2 cents ($0.002) per GB per month,
but with some usage caveats. Since the point of backups is to keep them for a
long time, this quickly adds up though. Now I’ve written a line or two of code
before, so I figured I could as well write my own tool for this. So here is
bart
, the backup and restore tool. Note
that at this point I do not offer bart
as a ready-to-use executable, but only as
MIT-licensed source code. In addition, bart
currently works only with Azure
Blob Storage - or with storage mounted into the machine’s file system. However,
adding other cloud providers/archive destinations should be relatively easy,
given the interfaces used in the tool.
Offline JSON Pretty Printing
Nowadays when you’re dealing with Web APIs, you often find yourself in the situation of handling JSON, either in the input for these APIs or in the output, or both. Some browsers have the means to pretty print the JSON from their dev tools. But you don’t always have that opportunity. That’s why there are tools to pretty-print JSON. I’ve found quite a few of them on the web, but all the ones I’ve found have one terrible flaw: they actually send the JSON you’re trying to pretty-print to the server 🙀. I don’t want my JSON data (sensitive or not) to be sent to some random servers!