I think I'd like one of these with Debian, Java and Crashplan. Slap it on a 4TB SATA drive, put it in a box, seed a backup onto it and ship it to a family member with broadband. Handy offsite backup.

The assorted troubles of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op as discussed in Planet Money episode 525 (March 19, 2014) are directly relevant to this.

Basically, it's easy for people to hoard, and there's likely going to be a need for quite a bit of back-end management.

There are two decent approaches: backup or mirror your setup offsite OR archive the previous generation intact and do incrementals starting from that point. I'm assuming that a home user isn't going to be picking up a $2000+ LTO-6 tape drive and swapping in 8+ $65 tapes for each full backup.

The first is to have your own offsite storage that you back up to, where the backup is (at least) as large as the original. Multiple people have recommended Crashplan, and that's certainly a viable option. There are undoubtedly other options that could do similar things depending on how down into the weeds you want to get - rsync, the various rsync-based versioning backup solutions, git-annex as mentioned by someone else though that one's new to me. I'll note that from experience with Crashplan's Enterprise product on some older 32-bit servers, the client software can chew some fairly significant memory when you have a lot of files or data.

The other and probably simpler option is that when you start to near capacity on the storage system, don't upgrade it - shut it down and store it, preferably not in the same (not-yet-burning) building after building the new system and copying the data over to it. After you shut the old one down, keep backups of anything you've changed since that "checkpoint" system; hopefully your data isn't changing that rapidly - 20 TB seems to me almost guaranteed to be mostly static.

I'd also expect within the next year or two (or less, considering how cheap they are) that police will be documenting crime scenes with "gigapixel" panoramas. Gigapan sells a robotic mount for DSLRs for under $1000, and I'm sure they're not the only ones.

Try the Lite version of the app - if you only need two connections then it may actually do what you need and is free.

If you do need the paid version, Tacit Dynamics (tacit.dk) apparently has it available through Amazon.com and through AndroidPit.com as well if either of those will work for you. The drawback of either is that I believe (as with most competing app markets) you have to keep that app market installed on your device.

I hit Submit too soon on the previous one. Isn't DLNA designed for that kind of in-home streaming of media between devices? If you're rolling your own for the sake of tinkering have at it, but if it's just to stream things around I'd look hard at the existing options first.

There's at least one app that may do what you want (rsync backup by Michal Kowalczuk), but I've never used it.

If that doesn't do the trick, I find that my tablet running Cyanogenmod 10.1.3 has rsync 3.0.7, but I've also installed extra bits and pieces ("Android Terminal Emulator" by Jack Palevich, "Terminal IDE" by Spartacus Rex, "Busybox Pro" by Stephen (stericson)) so I'm not 100% sure that it was originally available. You may be able to script and schedule something of your own based on scripts you use elsewhere, though with a few changes (e.g. "jping" instead of "ping", see Issue 29 on Terminal IDE's code.google.com page though that indicates that it may be fixed).

Yes, the one by Tacit Dynamics

I'd look at the FolderSync app, ~$3. It supports a huge number of backend connection types including FTP/SFTP, SMB/CIFS and WebDAV to cover most of your local server needs. It also covers most of the major and many minor cloud storage providers. You can set it up to sync only on specified wifi networks, to sync on schedules or when files change, etc.

There's also a "lite" version, which only allows 2 accounts, no Tasker support and no sync filters (which I've never fiddled with anyway, so may not be that important).

As Charlie Stross put it in his announcement, ""Halting State" wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006."

/. readers may be more familiar with the second book, or at least with the reference in its title: "Rule 34." The main character in that uses a descendant of Google Glass-like technology.

Did the researchers throw some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet at some point to check something? Is that spreadsheet included? It wasn't saved? This regulation is overturned.

I believe both Crossloop and Copilot are VNC-based.

Copilot is free to use on weekends (their "day pass" pricing is $5 on weekdays and free on weekends).

I see a variety of suggestions of getting another PC, but if your physically at the machine usage and other peoples' won't overlap, just get more memory and a second hard drive. Run VMs stored on that second drive - odds are good that you're not really CPU-bound these days unless there's some serious gaming going on.

You're quite correct, I missed a "who" in the (original) opening of this article: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/movie-theater-witnesses-no-punches-only-popcorn-thrown-before-shooting/2160911

I also saw it quoted elsewhere originally, so I didn't see the headline at the top.

My post above is incorrect - I missed a "who" when I saw the witness article quoted. There's no indication that the victim did anything except (possibly) throw a bag of popcorn.