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.
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.
I'm on the same boat. It's well designed, works great, and I really can't get it out of my head as a well-engineered project and great idea.
But it really is nearly abandoned, and outside of the happy-path the primary author uses it for, it's desolate. There is no community around growing its usage, and pull requests have sat around for months before the maintainer replies. Which is fine if that's what the author wants (he's quite busy!), but disappointing to potential adopters. I've looked at using it, but with data types that sit outside the author's use case, and you'd really need to fork it and change code all over the repo to effectively use it. It just never hit the ideal of "store everything" it promises when it has hard-coded data types for indexing and system support.
(and yes, I did look at forking it and creating my own indexer, but some things just aren't meant to be)
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).
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?
That not really a surprise, the website and documentation is awful, not really selling the project well. I also get the impression there is not really customization possible, no integration of external stuff, just a monolithic blob, doing something. This kind of software can't succeed easily without an open architecture, or a proper selling documentation of how to utilize it for your own demand.
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?
If I take a bunch of photos, those don’t have filenames (or not good ones, and not unique). They just exist. They don’t need a directory or a name.
So how are you supposed to find anything? Sure, I take photos. Most of them aren't needed after they serve their immediate purpose, but I can't be bothered to delete them, or sort or name the ones that do have a longer purpose. But at least they are organized automatically by date. For permanence, OwnCloud archives them for me automatically, from where they get sucked into my regular backups.
Why would I want to toss them all into an even less-organized pile?
[run] search queries over my higher-level objects. e.g. a “recent” directory of recent photos
How, exactly, are those search queries supposed to work? Sure, maybe date is retained in meta-info, but at best he is regaining the functionality he lost by tossing those pictures into a pile. If he is expecting actual image recognition, that could work anyway, without the pile.
It would be nice if we were a bit more in control. At least, it would be nice if we had a reliable backup of all our content. Once we have all our content, it’s then nice to search it, view it, and directly serve it or share it out to others
Sure, and that's exactly what you achieve with OwnCloud (or NextCloud, or whatever).
As for reliable backups, that's a completely different issue, which still has to be solved separately. You have got to periodically copy your data to offline storage, or you don't have real backups.
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.
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).
I've been using single file for five years and I've never had this issue for what it's worth. I keep a directory called Archives on my Synology that I expose with Copy Party, and I routinely back up web pages and then drop the result into my Copy Party instance for safekeeping.
I would look into what happened with the single file copies you made that didn't work because that is highly unusual.
I have SingleFile configured to post full archives to Karakeep with an HTTP POST; this enables archiving pages from my browser that Karakeep cannot scrape and bookmark due to paywalls or bot protection.
I love ArchiveBox but the headless Chromium they use has some annoying "will break randomly and GFL trying to figure out why/how to fix it" problems (like it'll just randomly stop working because the profile is locked except the lock file isn't there and even if you tweak things to make 100% sure the profile lock is removed before and after every archive request, it'll still randomly fail on a locked profile and WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!)
Although, to be fair, running it in Docker seems less fraught and breaks less often (and it's a lot easier to restart when it does break.)
(I've got a pipeline from Instapaper -> {IFTTT -> {Pinboard -> Linkhut, Dropbox, Webhook -> ArchiveBox}} which works well most of the time for archiving random pages. Used to be Pocket until Mozilla decided to be evil.)
I happened upon a bit of an unconventional approach to this with Zotero. It’s obviously more focused on academic research but it takes snapshots and works as a more general purpose archive tool really well.
On Firefox, but I still feel the need to reply. You might find it handy, or other readers here might like it. Maybe it's also available for Chrome, I don't know.
I've been using an extension called WebScrapBook to locally save copies of interesting webpages. I use the basic functionality, but it comes with tons of options and settings.
Interesting idea. Pretty timely as I recently started working (again) on a concept cross-platform "superapp" and have been trying to think of a decent state/storage sync solution.
I think many of us builds the same idea nowadays with many different tools and services. It became the "project car" of tech enthusiasts. But it's complicated and subjective enough that I guess it can not be abstracted down this way. We'd need some common platform, something like Synology was vaguely going for.
There seem to be a lot of folks who'd want this, but are hesitant because of (a) there not being more people using it or (b) there not being more releases.
This is strange in the sense that (a) didn't stop the Linux kernel from becoming more popular - if the tool satisfies the itch, use it, otherwise not. And the lack of releases could be fine if the bugs reported are minor.
Is the tool robust (no data loss)?
What has other folks on here stopped from e.g. writing more importers (if that is the main shortcoming)?
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.
(Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.) I'm building an app _conceptually similar_, but with an AI on top, so you get a chat/assistant with your personal context. https://github.com/superegodev/superego (Warning: still in alpha.)
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.
I was looking for various options to archive my data (photos, documents, code), and have looked at Perkeep since a while, but then started using Git-Annex.
However, I regret this decision. Git-Annex is not usable anymore on my data because the amount of files has grown so much (millions) and Git-Annex is just too slow (it takes minutes up to even hours for some Git operation, and the FS is decently fast). I assume I would not have had those problems with Perkeep.
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.
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.
I'm on the same boat. It's well designed, works great, and I really can't get it out of my head as a well-engineered project and great idea.
But it really is nearly abandoned, and outside of the happy-path the primary author uses it for, it's desolate. There is no community around growing its usage, and pull requests have sat around for months before the maintainer replies. Which is fine if that's what the author wants (he's quite busy!), but disappointing to potential adopters. I've looked at using it, but with data types that sit outside the author's use case, and you'd really need to fork it and change code all over the repo to effectively use it. It just never hit the ideal of "store everything" it promises when it has hard-coded data types for indexing and system support.
(and yes, I did look at forking it and creating my own indexer, but some things just aren't meant to be)
> There is no community around growing its usage
I just added support for perkeep in Filestash last week (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash)
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).
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.
I immediately thought about how this would be awesome if it worked with tailscale - pretty complimentary tech I think.
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?
I think @kamranjon means that, before this tailscale compatible release happened, thought about how cool it be if it worked directly with tailscale.
Primarily using Tailscale for authentication as well, replacing perkeep's other auth methods.
It appears that it does integrate with Tailscale for auth (but not using tsidp via OIDC like I expected): https://perkeep.org/doc/server-config#simplemode
That not really a surprise, the website and documentation is awful, not really selling the project well. I also get the impression there is not really customization possible, no integration of external stuff, just a monolithic blob, doing something. This kind of software can't succeed easily without an open architecture, or a proper selling documentation of how to utilize it for your own demand.
Kinda sad, as this looks interesting.
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?
The overview is very comprehensive: https://perkeep.org/doc/overview
Consider this example that he gives:
If I take a bunch of photos, those don’t have filenames (or not good ones, and not unique). They just exist. They don’t need a directory or a name.
So how are you supposed to find anything? Sure, I take photos. Most of them aren't needed after they serve their immediate purpose, but I can't be bothered to delete them, or sort or name the ones that do have a longer purpose. But at least they are organized automatically by date. For permanence, OwnCloud archives them for me automatically, from where they get sucked into my regular backups.
Why would I want to toss them all into an even less-organized pile?
[run] search queries over my higher-level objects. e.g. a “recent” directory of recent photos
How, exactly, are those search queries supposed to work? Sure, maybe date is retained in meta-info, but at best he is regaining the functionality he lost by tossing those pictures into a pile. If he is expecting actual image recognition, that could work anyway, without the pile.
It would be nice if we were a bit more in control. At least, it would be nice if we had a reliable backup of all our content. Once we have all our content, it’s then nice to search it, view it, and directly serve it or share it out to others
Sure, and that's exactly what you achieve with OwnCloud (or NextCloud, or whatever).
As for reliable backups, that's a completely different issue, which still has to be solved separately. You have got to periodically copy your data to offline storage, or you don't have real backups.
Seriously, I'm just not seeing it...
> If I take a bunch of photos, those don’t have filenames (or not good ones, and not unique). They just exist. They don’t need a directory or a name.
At least all the photos I take have a date and place attached to them. That is usually all the info I need to find them.
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.
Seriously. They should just straight up replace the front page with this.
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).
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
Thanks. I've tried SingleFile. I made some backups using the Chrome Extension. I was unable to open them a couple of years later. So I abandoned it.
Will try karakeep.
I've been using single file for five years and I've never had this issue for what it's worth. I keep a directory called Archives on my Synology that I expose with Copy Party, and I routinely back up web pages and then drop the result into my Copy Party instance for safekeeping.
I would look into what happened with the single file copies you made that didn't work because that is highly unusual.
Author of SingleFile here. Sorry, this is obviously not normal. Please feel free to report any bugs here https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/issues.
I have SingleFile configured to post full archives to Karakeep with an HTTP POST; this enables archiving pages from my browser that Karakeep cannot scrape and bookmark due to paywalls or bot protection.
https://docs.karakeep.app/guides/singlefile/
Thanks for mentioning it was about to hack something together myself.
Have you tried ArchiveBox https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox ? It's a pretty solid implementation of that pattern.
I love ArchiveBox but the headless Chromium they use has some annoying "will break randomly and GFL trying to figure out why/how to fix it" problems (like it'll just randomly stop working because the profile is locked except the lock file isn't there and even if you tweak things to make 100% sure the profile lock is removed before and after every archive request, it'll still randomly fail on a locked profile and WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!)
Although, to be fair, running it in Docker seems less fraught and breaks less often (and it's a lot easier to restart when it does break.)
(I've got a pipeline from Instapaper -> {IFTTT -> {Pinboard -> Linkhut, Dropbox, Webhook -> ArchiveBox}} which works well most of the time for archiving random pages. Used to be Pocket until Mozilla decided to be evil.)
I happened upon a bit of an unconventional approach to this with Zotero. It’s obviously more focused on academic research but it takes snapshots and works as a more general purpose archive tool really well.
On Firefox, but I still feel the need to reply. You might find it handy, or other readers here might like it. Maybe it's also available for Chrome, I don't know.
I've been using an extension called WebScrapBook to locally save copies of interesting webpages. I use the basic functionality, but it comes with tons of options and settings.
No options?
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)
they've been around for 8 years and are still in 0.12?!
What's wrong with that? That seems like more than one release per year, and all roughly compatible with each other.
They just released 0.12 today or yesterday (5 years to the day), which is probably a reason the project is on HN.
I wish bradfitz had more time to work on it.
Well good news, he's writing the latest commits
Interesting idea. Pretty timely as I recently started working (again) on a concept cross-platform "superapp" and have been trying to think of a decent state/storage sync solution.
I just use synching. Works well. A bit wasteful, but I have many things in syncthing in triplicate. (Phone, laptop, desktop).
I think many of us builds the same idea nowadays with many different tools and services. It became the "project car" of tech enthusiasts. But it's complicated and subjective enough that I guess it can not be abstracted down this way. We'd need some common platform, something like Synology was vaguely going for.
First new release in 5 years?
There seem to be a lot of folks who'd want this, but are hesitant because of (a) there not being more people using it or (b) there not being more releases.
This is strange in the sense that (a) didn't stop the Linux kernel from becoming more popular - if the tool satisfies the itch, use it, otherwise not. And the lack of releases could be fine if the bugs reported are minor.
Is the tool robust (no data loss)?
What has other folks on here stopped from e.g. writing more importers (if that is the main shortcoming)?
edit: typo corrected
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.
I like this... right now I'm using a ras pi 3 or 4 as a file server and it seems to mostly work?
What kind of storage are you using? (SSD, compact flash etc.)
Can it be used with AI to create your personal context?
(Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.) I'm building an app _conceptually similar_, but with an AI on top, so you get a chat/assistant with your personal context. https://github.com/superegodev/superego (Warning: still in alpha.)
This looks fantastic!
I've been thinking about building a similar application for a while now, and you gave me some great ideas.
Will try it out today.
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.
I was looking for various options to archive my data (photos, documents, code), and have looked at Perkeep since a while, but then started using Git-Annex.
However, I regret this decision. Git-Annex is not usable anymore on my data because the amount of files has grown so much (millions) and Git-Annex is just too slow (it takes minutes up to even hours for some Git operation, and the FS is decently fast). I assume I would not have had those problems with Perkeep.
Do you backup your .gitt artefacts? Is it even optimal? Sounds like interesting idea.