yet another tech blog
Putting the Raspberry Pi to work uploading files to the Amazon S3 backup vault. Much more energy efficient compared to keeping the PC running for the same job.
Amazing how many uses this little SoC has . I’m ending up with a pile of microSD cards for all its identities 🙂
The gaming PC at home had started getting a bit old and it was time to start overclocking. That way it’d be possible to squeeze a few more months out of the machine before the inevitable upgrade. Of course with a stock Intel CPU cooler it quickly overheated. It reached 98 degrees before I had a chance to power it down 🙂
So, a trip to Akihabara got me a fairly cheap Lepa AquaChanger240 but in my hurry to get a cooler I had underestimated the size of this monster. The thickness of the cooler with fans mounted is about 5.5cm – no way it would fit in the PC case, even though it’s a full tower.
As a result I found myself looking for a new case. Overclocking clearly has its consequences. Yet another trip to Akihabara resulted in the beautiful and spacious Corsair Carbide Air 540. Awesome to look at from both the outside and inside thanks to the ease of which cables can be kept hidden in the second chamber.
Since I wanted to go with green LEDs to light it up it made sense to give it a paint job at the same time. The normally black grilles on top and front are now a bright green. The case is extremely easy to disassemble which helped a lot in removing the parts for painting.
The Lepa CPU cooler works fantastically well. The processor – an Intel i7 2600k, has been clocked from the base 3.4 up to it’s current 4.6 Ghz. Even under severe stress testing the temperature stays in the 50’s.
At home we have a 4-disk QNAP box as a file server which hosts photos dating back to the 1990s. Up to recently it was backed up over eSATA to external drives, but it was never a good solution. The QNAP box does offer cloud backup, but I don’t want to be dependent on somebody else’s proprietary way of copying data to the cloud. So, yesterday I finally got hacking on a Python script to back the whole thing up to a cloud provider.
After looking at Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform and BLOB storage in Microsoft Azure (which I use frequently at work) I finally went with S3 as it has the option to automatically shift data to the ultra-low-cost Glacier service after a set time. There are good tutorials to get started for those who are interested here: http://boto.cloudhackers.com/en/latest/s3_tut.html
Amazon recommends splitting files larger than 100Mb prior to upload and Boto can be used with file splitting as well.
Prior to this it was necessary to encrypt all data to ensure it wasn’t easily accessible by any third party. Not that I expect anyone to have an interest in some family photos, but anyway. To make sure it would be possible even for my wife to decrypt the data I went with 7za since it simply creates zip files encrypted with AES. Encrypting is as easy as:
I may post the actual backup script here as well once it’s been through a few revisions, but it’s too rough for publication right now.
When the only thing readily available for stirring your tea is a pile of PCIe brackets 🙂
Just created a private cloud at シルバニア森のキッチン
