CORPSE: COld stoRage backuP SoftwarE

I've recently started using Amazon Glacier to store the backup of last resort of all my digital photos (I've discussed the motivation behind this on my other blog). While I think the idea of cold storage, and Glacier in particular, is great there is just one problem; Amazon don't provide a friendly user interface for Glacier. Glacier is part of the Amazon Web Service (AWS) framework, and as such is designed as a service around which other people can develop applications.

A quick web search will bring up links to quite a few different tools for using Glacier. I'm currently uploading my data using SAGU (the Simple Amazon Glacier Uploader). While SAGU does make uploading data to Glacier easy it has a number of shortcomings which the developer is working to address. I've proposed a couple of patches, but I'm also looking at implementing more useful functionality (for example, range based downloads are a must have feature if you want to keep the costs under control). While I'm hopping that some of the ideas I'm working on might be incorporated into SAGU, I'm currently developing them in a separate project which I'm calling CORPSE (which of course stands for COld stoRage backuP SoftwarE).

Even if CORPSE doesn't result in a full application, I'm using it to a) experiment with a number of Java libraries I've not used before (including AWS itself, Jackson, Flyway) and b) using git for version control. In the past I've always used a centralised version control system (be that CVS, PVCS or SVN), but the decentralised nature of git is intriguing and with a free account on GitHub I don't have anything to lose. I'm sure I'll mention CORPSE again on this blog in the future but if you want to take a look at what is there now or to follow development then you can find it in this GitHub project.