As per my previous post, I am exploring interesting technologies to bring my engagement with the web a little more under my own control. In this post I want to share a little about a software called Perkeep which aims to let you “…permanently keep your stuff, for life.”
Hosted over at https://perkeep.org/ Perkeep (previously called Camlistore) is a project written in Golang which creates a local store of your data which is designed to kept for life.
It includes some great features for me, specifically the FUSE mount, so I can write direct to it. Indexing (so I can find it again), date based history of a file so I can restore a file from it with the state that file was in then.
It also has importers from things like RSS feeds, Twitter, Mastodon and google photos. So when this post goes out on my website, Perkeep will automatically download it and store it for me. The same is true of photos, tweets etc. They even get shown on an interactive map based on their geo information if it exists.
I can backup (automatically) my Perkeep data to another location and multiple locations. So for example to a external USB drive and to Amazon S3 storage. So I have some sense of security that my data is safe.
This is the second time I have tried Perkeep, I tried it once before when it was still called Camlistore. This time I have engaged a bit more and have started porting the data I was storing in Git-Annex to Perkeep.
A feature I am exploring which really will be the clincher if I can get it working, is the ability to have a “cache” of data locally on my SSD drive, then more data on slower disk, and all my data backed up on online storage (S3). Then transparently have all of it available but only things that are “recent” stored locally.
My main concern with Perkeep is that it seems a very quiet project; not much conversation in IRC or mailing list. Though the IRC interaction I have had has been great. There are hundreds of issues in Github too… that said there are 800 closed issues
I am really hoping that some of the importers come to fruition, specifically Facebook and Runkeeper. I’d be interested in importers for other services I use too.
Specifically, if I stay happy with the technology; I am thinking of writing (or collaborating in the writing) of an importer for Scuttlebutt. I think the idea of having SSB data outside of SSB in Perkeep “just in case” I stopped using SBB sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I’d be interested in hearing from others that have used Perkeep; specifically those who have done more than just experimented; and used the software regularly and especially of you have that cached data setup I mentioned!
Git-Annex was oky, but Perkeep is more what I am looking for. It also preforms really well with the size/qualitity of binary files I hav
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