Perkeep – Personal storage system for life

(perkeep.org)

102 points | by nikolay 3 hours ago ago

26 comments

  • bigfishrunning 2 hours ago

    I don't really understand the goal here. It feels like "wouldn't it be nice if instead of organizing a library, we just kept all of the information in a giant unsorted pile of looseleaf paper?"

    How is this better then a filesystem with automated replication?

    • debo_ 2 hours ago

      The overview is very comprehensive: https://perkeep.org/doc/overview

      • crooked-v an hour ago

        This desparately needs to be on the main page to explain what this actually does, and not buried under "Docs", which isn't at all where I would expect to find this kind of thing.

        • adastra22 16 minutes ago

          Seriously. They should just straight up replace the front page with this.

  • burke 2 hours ago

    I have used perkeep. I still do at least in theory. I love the concept of it but it’s become… not quite abandonware, but it never gained enough traction to really take on a full life of its own before the primary author moved on. A bit of a tragedy because the basic idea is pretty compelling.

    • mikepurvis 2 hours ago

      I evaluated it for a home server a few years ago and yeah— compelling in concept, but a system like this lives or dies by the quality of its integrations to other systems, the ability to automatically ingest photos and notes from your phone, or documents from your computer, or your tax returns from Dropbox.

      A permanent private data store needs to have straightforward ways to get that data into it, and then search and consume it again once there.

    • frio 2 hours ago

      I've been similarly half-interested in it for... more than a decade now. The new release (which is what I assume prompted this post) looks pretty impressive (https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/releases/tag/v0.12).

      • uf00lme an hour ago

        The quality of code and reputation of the authors is excellent in this new release.

        I’ve never looked at it before but this seems pretty solid, definitely worth keeping an eye on or testing.

      • kamranjon 2 hours ago

        I immediately thought about how this would be awesome if it worked with tailscale - pretty complimentary tech I think.

        • vermilingua a minute ago

          Why would this need to work with Tailscale? It just needs to be running on a machine in your tailnet to be accessible, what other integration is necessary?

  • tomhow an hour ago

    Previously:

    Keep Your Stuff, for Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676350 - June 2020 (109 comments)

    Perkeep: personal storage system for life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240 - Sept 2018 (62 comments)

    Perkeep – Open-source data modeling, storing, search, sharing and synchronizing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15928685 - Dec 2017 (105 comments)

    • yawnxyz an hour ago

      they've been around for 8 years and are still in 0.12?!

      • avhon1 23 minutes ago

        What's wrong with that? That seems like more than one release per year, and all roughly compatible with each other.

      • philsnow an hour ago

        They just released 0.12 today or yesterday (5 years to the day), which is probably a reason the project is on HN.

  • profsummergig 2 hours ago

    And here I'm still looking for a way, with one click, to create an offline backup of the webpages each of my bookmarks points to. Such that the offline version looks and works exactly like the online version in (say) Google Chrome (e.g. the CTRL+F feature works fine). And such that I can use some key-combo and click a bookmark in my bookmarks manager (in Chrome) to open a webpage from the backup (or the backup can have its own copy of the bookmarks manager... it needs a catalog of some sort or it won't be useful).

  • ucirello an hour ago

    I wish bradfitz had more time to work on it.

  • spiritplumber 2 hours ago

    I like this... right now I'm using a ras pi 3 or 4 as a file server and it seems to mostly work?

    • iberator 28 minutes ago

      What kind of storage are you using? (SSD, compact flash etc.)

  • lynx97 an hour ago

    At first glance, this looks like way too much to trust in the long run. I use git-annex since roughly 10 years to archive files I don't want to loose again. Does everything I want, and is pretty simple for what it gives me. A checksum for every file, replication on a file-basis, does not dictate the underlying filesystem I use. Full syncs are rather slow, but in reality, it doesn't really matter if I have to wait 3 hours or 2 days, just let it run in the background and do its thing.

    • iberator 26 minutes ago

      Do you backup your .gitt artefacts? Is it even optimal? Sounds like interesting idea.

  • outside1234 an hour ago

    I feel like there have been a number of attempts in this content addressed space and that nobody has gotten it quite right, not that the underlying idea is unsound.