ExpanDrive

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

Strongspace has top level folders called Spaces. You’ll see your spaces listed in the sidebar on left-hand side of the files browser. Think of them as regular folders that you can set special permissions so that you can collaborate on your data both via the web or SFTP. You can even set up a shared network drive using ExpanDrive. Create a new space by clicking the plus button ‘‘ to the right of “Your Spaces” and picking a name.

Adding a collaborator to a space

Giving a friend, family member or co-worker access to a space is simple. Click the gear icon ‘‘ next to person you want to share your data with and hit “Add.” An invitation will be sent to the email address you typed, prompting the user to set a new password. They now have their own [free] Strongspace account along with access to the data you shared with them.

Connecting via SFTP/rsync to a shared space

Let’s say that the user “expandrive” shared their home space with you. To get at that data via SFTP you’d connect to the server expandrive.strongspace.com and the data would be at the path /strongspace/expandrive/home

The Future of Spaces

Right now spaces are just folders in the top level of your filesystem. Going forward we’ll be introducing fancy spaces that have a variety of cool features attached to them. The first of these fancy spaces is actually your Public space – it has the property that all the contents are automatically shared/hosted to the world by default. Our plan is to introduce fancy spaces for photo galleries, music, source code repositories and more.

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

A couple of weeks ago I emailed out asking for some feedback on Strongspace and a lot of you said you’d love to see a option for yearly billing. Yearly billing is now up and running and we’re offering 12 months for the price of 10 on all plans (16.6% off). To get the discount just log in to your account and head to Plan & Billing, under account settings, and you’ll see a big button that lets you switch to yearly billing.

Enjoy!

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

Strongspace lets you grab a unique link to any file on Strongspace – but it also provides a simple Public Space, where all files are shared by default and are accessible by filename, if you know it. This makes for nice and simple asset hosting where you can easily toss files up to Strongspace with rsync, SFTP or SCP and then have a known link to that file without having to interact with the service. Here is an example:

Push an image to Strongspace

$ scp lost_in_translation.jpg ss:/strongspace/expandrive/public

Now grab it using Safari

$ open https://www.strongspace.com/expandrive/public/lost_in_translation.jpg

That was easy. You can still use the link button to grab the public link to this file

Coming soon we’ll provide the ability to browse folders as well as send down index files so you can serve up things such as sites generated with iWeb.

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

Strongspace is a great place for secure offsite backup over SFTP and rsync. But it’s a lot more fun to be able to share your files with friends, family and co-workers – what fun is backing up your iTunes library if you can’t easily pass a song to a friend? We’ve recently pushed a feature which lets you securely share any file in your Strongspace with a unique secure link. Simply hover over any file and a link button appears

Click the link button and you’ll get a popup where you can grab a secure link to that file. Send this link to whoever you want and they can download the file without a Strongspace account.

You will also notice the “Shared Links” tab at the end of your list of Spaces – clicking there will let you manage and remove shared links you have handed out.

In the coming weeks we’ll be adding the ability to set passwords on files as well as provide automatic link expiration. Also, if you’re not familiar you should really check out Passion Pit

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

rsync is a very popular and comes included on all Macs and is available for windows and linux. It lets you efficiently backup files and folders over SSH and it is a great way to mirror data off to Strongspace.

However, it is one of those unix-y programs which has a MILLION different options to twiddle and can be rather intimidating. I thought a basic post on how to use rsync with with Strongspace in the most general fashion would be useful.

All you need to remember

rsync -avz [source_path] [destination:destination_path]

This is the basic command structure with a handful of basic options attached: compress the data, verbose output, recurse the source folders and preserve timestamps and user ids.

Backup your Mac Desktop Strongspace:

rsync -avz ~/Desktop username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home

One small bit to note is the difference between typing ~/Desktop and ~/Desktop/ – the later way does not create a Desktop folder in Strongspace but sends all the contents of the Desktop into your destination. It can be a bit messy if that wasn’t your intention.

Backup iPhoto to Strongspace:

rsync -avz ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home

Here is a simple example that sends the entire contents of your iPhoto library up to Strongspace.

Making it simpler

Let’s admit, this isn’t a short command:

rsync -avz ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library username@username.strongspace.com:/strongspace/username/home

but you can shorten it down to this:

rsync ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library ss:/strongspace/username/home

First, do yourself the favor and setup a SSH alias and, if you want, password-less login. To make life even easier you can default rsync options by using a bash alias. Open Terminal and paste this line:

echo 'alias rsync="rsync -avz"' >> .profile

Now the next time you open a new Terminal window rsync will have those options set by default.

Happy sync’ing!

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

If you have a long Strongspace username and are regularly accessing Strongspace from command-line tools you’ll often be typing out something like jmancuso_expandrive@jmancuso_expandrive.strongspace.com in your commands. After a while this can be a bit cumbersome. To save yourself a lot of typing you can replace that entire string with a short SSH alias such as ss. Combine that with with SSH Key authentication and you’ve got a recipe for friction-free transfer to and from Strongspace.

To create an SSH alias on Mac or Linux:

1. Open up your Terminal application
2. Open ~/.ssh/config with your favorite text editor. If you don’t have a favorite editor you can use TextEdit which comes with your Mac open -a TextEdit ~/.ssh/config

3. I am going to name my alias to Strongspace ss. Call yours whatever you’d like. Add the following 3 lines:

   Host ss
       HostName your_username.strongspace.com
       User your_username

4. You can now use the alias ss whenever you’re connecting to Strongspace with the rsync, sftp or scp command-line tools. This alias also works in many popular Mac SFTP clients including ExpanDrive, Interarchy and Transmit.

… re-blogged from our Strongspace Blog

Let’s say you want to create an automated nightly backup of your MySQL database to Strongspace but you don’t want to leave your Strongspace password stored directly in your backup script for all to see. Strongspace lets you create trusted relationship between your machine and Strongspace using SSH keys. You can think of an SSH key as two extremely long passwords, stored in a files, that SFTP and rsync will use to authenticate with Strongspace. You hold on to the private key and give Strongspace the public key. There is now a unique secure relationship between your machine and Strongspace that lets you safely authenticate without your primary account password.

Generating SSH Keys

Mac or Linux:

1. Open up your Terminal application
2. Type: ssh-keygen to generate the keys
3. You will then be prompted to enter a location to save the key pair. Feel free to use the default.
4. After generating the keys it will prompt for a passphrase. This will be used when accessing the keys, providing another level of security if someone were to obtain your private key (which of course you shouldn’t share). You can leave it blank for rsync backups to Strongspace to work seamlessly without requiring the user to type in a password. However except for this case you should add a passphrase.
5. Copy the contents of id_rsa.pub to the clipboard. On a Mac, with the Terminal still open, type: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

Windows:

1. Download and run PuTTYgen
2. Click Generate public/private key pair
3. Save public key – save pick a name like id_rsa.pub
4. Save your private key. When saving your private key, PuTTYgen gives you two options, the default is to save in the PuTTY format [.ppk] or you click on the conversions menu and export an OpenSSH format key. Depending on what application you use these keys with you might want to export both.
5. Select and copy the public key to your clipboard

Using SSH Keys on Strongspace

Sign into Strongspace, head over to the Account tab, and select the SSH Public Keys sub-tab. Click Add a new key… and paste in the contents of your public key, along with an optional nickname and click Save key.

To test our your key setup log into Strongspace using the command line sftp tool on Mac or Linux:

sftp username@username.strongspace.com

Where username is your Strongspace username. You should now be logged into Strongspace without having used a password. Good job!

A little over 5 years ago Jason Hoffman of TextDrive announced Strongspace 1.0. TextDrive has since merged with Joyent and focused on Smart cloud computing and less on applications. In June of 2009 Joyent sold Strongspace and Bingodisk to ExpanDrive so that we could continue to develop the service and better serve the existing customers.

ExpanDrive has a long history with Joyent and its customers. We first met Joyent’s CEO Dave Young back in 2006 because Strongspace customers were using ExpanDrive en masse to mount their Strongspace as an external drive – which was awesome. We worked with Joyent to let their customers get our ExpanDrive client installed and set up straight from the Strongspace dashboard. Following that, we collaborated on and produced Joyent Slingshot, a hybrid online-offline Ruby on Rails framework that was a precursor to Google Gears and HTML5 offline caching. Dave and Jason have been invaluable as we’ve taken the reins to launch the long-promised Strongspace 2.0.

I’m proud to announce that we’re now open for business and taking new customers again. Strongspace 2.0 keeps the best parts of the original – SFTP and rsync running on Joyent SmartMachines with ZFS, the most advanced filesystem in the world. We continue to use secure open standards so you can backup and access your data with your favorite SFTP client or library rather than a crappy half-baked solution that bogs down your laptop and eats up all your RAM.

On top the Strongspace core we’ve built an awesome webapp to browse, manage and share your data. Getting data securely into and out of Strongspace has never been easier. Strongspace now provides top-level folders called, called Spaces, to which you can easily give others web and SFTP access. In addition we provide a public folder whose contents are automatically shared, as well as the ability to grab a secure link to any file in your Strongspace to share with whoever you’d like. And this is just the beginning.

Check out the plans an start a 30 Day Free Trial!

… One more thing: all active accounts come with a free copy of ExpanDrive.

For more Strongspace specific posts be sure to subscribe to the Strongspace Blog where we’ll be putting up all sorts of posts about ExpanDrive, Strongspace, SFTP, rsync and much more.

For those of you out there who have BIngodisk accounts – please be aware that at the end of the month Bingodisk, an only disk service formerly run by Joyent – is being turned off. We are offering all Bingodisk customers a simple and hopefully painless migration path into Strongspace. Simply log in to www.strongspace using your username@bingodisk.com username and password and you will be presented with a path to migrate in. More on this soon, but we wanted to make sure the word was out. Thanks!

In case you’ve missed one of the many many reminders we’ve sent – please note that Strongspace v1 [Joyent Strongspace] is closing down this weekend. To migrate over to the all-new Strongspace just sign in at www.strongspace.com and you’ll be presented a transition page. For those who get this notice late, we’ll still be accepting migrations through mid-August. If you’re having trouble logging in, please email support@strongspace.com letting us know you need help or a password reset – please include your username!

BingoDisk migrations will be starting in a few days, so be on the lookout for that. Thanks!