I can't quite grasp what this is (as in, what the software is, is that a server, a client, or a combination of both), or how could I get started in using it.<p>>Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are<p>Is there any special significane for 80 years? And exactly how is it safe? The "Download" sections have me installing the server on my box, and my hdd certainly won't survive 80 years.<p>Under storage, it says that<p>>Implementations are trivial and exist for local disk, Amazon S3, Google Storage, etc.<p>How does encryption work? I can't seem to find out at which step the encryption is done (client side, or server side?). The home page mentions it's "private by default", considering that I don't know that much about security and cryptography in general, how safe would I be in using this, for whatever purposes that it could be used for.<p>Mention under potential use cases: filesystems backups and Document management CMS. That's ... interesting.
If you're confused as to what this project is about or why it's important, I highly recommend watching the first ~10 minutes of the video posted on the main site. Brad Fitzgerald does a much better way of explaining the value proposition.<p>I personally think this is one of the most hugely important ideas/protocols to come out of the last decade. Even if Camlistore doesn't do it, it's hard to imagine software programmers of the future <i>not</i> agreeing on a shared protocol to fill this huge, huge need.<p>I actually wrote a proposal for a Mozilla grant recently outlining a couple of the reasons why decoupling storage from user interface is a fundamentally good thing for society[1].<p>[1]<a href="https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/stop-letting-facebook-own-your-data-web-applications-should-ask-you-for-your-data-not-the-other-way-around" rel="nofollow">https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/sto...</a>
Original post from three years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156374" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156374</a><p>Camlistore has always been a project that I'd like to try out someday but every time I've looked it's seemed more hypothetical than real. Kenneth Reitz (of python requests fame, among other things) put together a much smaller thing called Elephant[1] that I've been tempted to explore as well, and it's sort of in the same vein.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/kennethreitz/elephant" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kennethreitz/elephant</a>
This is a subject of great interest to librarians and archivists--how to store various types of data so that both it and its associated indexes remain fully accessible and searchable, with a minimum of maintenance, across decades or centuries, even as formats, maintainers, and institutions rise and fall.<p>Anyone know if these guys are working with existing archival groups and standards? It would be a shame if they're reinventing the wheel.
If you are learning / playing with Go(Lang) you should definitely take a look at this source.<p>As a tool it's a bit rough yet, but it's going to be awesome.<p>Disclaimer :
I have a man crush with Brad Fitzpatrick. Well, mostly with his code.
My understanding of this is that it's "A git style CMS for all your data"... so you can't nuke things as there's history of it, and you can put any data you want into it.<p>Where I struggle is that either the definition of "your data" is narrow, or I shouldn't be using it for all my data.<p>Back in 1999 when I first learned about MP3, I started ripping my CDs. I have several thousand CDs, this took a lot of time. Before I completed the task, at a rate of a few CDs each evening, FLACs came into my life and I started back at the beginning. I deleted the MP3s as I replaced them with FLACs.<p>I really don't ever need to keep some data. But maybe it's not the kind of data that I should be putting in Camlistore? I think of it as my data, after all these are my CDs.<p>I struggle with the concept of Camlistore as I have an 18TB NAS in RAID6, 12TB usable... and it's 80% full. If I had history I'd have a storage problem today.<p>I'm perhaps an outlier, I chose to self-host my data locally rather than rely on cloud based things. And I chose to keep everything... photos, documents, email, video, music. And everything I keep is in the highest possible quality: FLACs, DVD VOBs, raw photos, etc.<p>But then... who is Camlistore aimed at if not the people who like to store and have control over their own data?<p>I guess I just find delete too valuable a feature for the larger data I store.<p>And perhaps I'm just wrong on the use-case, maybe it's really "for all your data (that you cannot re-acquire)". I just don't want to ever rip those CDs again. But if I do, those old versions are dead to me.
I just tried to get this running using release 0.7, but I am puzzled by the web interface. I have not managed to upload a file through it, and once I did upload a file through the commandline tool camput it did not seem to show up on the web interface. Seems like a cool concept, and I hope I'm doing something wrong since I would like this to work.
Spoiler: if you came here all excited about the name beginning with Caml, Camli stands for Content-Addressable Multi-Level Indexed. It isn't related to the Categorical Abstract Machine Language. It's written in Go, not OCaml. (Yes, I know long ago Zinc was substituted for the Categorical Abstract Machine down in the depths of OCaml.)
This sounds like what git-annex does today, except with a front-end. How is it different from this understanding?<p>git-annex stores things content addressed, gives me different views into the data (tags, etc), and supports different back-ends (S3, remote rsync, local filesystem, external disks, etc). Isn't this exactly what is described here?
<a href="http://nymote.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nymote.org/</a> is running along similar lines and has some serious technical chops behind it (including some of the original Xen folks). I'm not so sure about their UX skills, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
To everyone who doesn't understand what this is all about, I suggest you read the presentations and watch the videos [0]. They're going deeper into what camlistore is and can do.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842629" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842629</a>
As a non-english speaker, I always associated this with caml/ocaml and the ml languages - and I still do somehow even after I have visited the site and read about it, and what it is.<p>What does "camli" means?
This sounds very similar to diaspora. The whole project is about replacing social networkings idea of giving all of your info to a 3rd party, and only sharing some info with people you trust.