Universal-Backup-for-Flickr

Script for backing up ANY files to Flickr

Flickr gives each user 1000 file uploads, which can be images or videos. The maximum file size for a video is 1GB, allowing for up to 1TB of free file hosting. This script encrypts files, then masks them as videos to upload to Flickr to take advantage of the maximum possible 1TB of storage as universal file backup. Files or directories larger than 1GB will be split into 1GB chunks before upload and can be combined and decrypted back to the original.

This script is primitive. It currently works on my machine, but may or may not work as intended on other systems.

Usage

Dependencies

Depends on

• tar
  • macOS: included
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S tar
• Flickcurl
  • macOS: brew install flickcurl
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S flickcurl
• 7-Zip
  • macOS: brew install p7zip
  • Arch: sudo pacman -S p7zip

Install

1. Clone the repository or download it as a zip and extract.
2. Set the script permissions to be able to be run:

    sudo chmod +x flickrbackup.sh

Making a backup

Flickcurl must be first configured and linked to your Flickr account. Test it (ex: flickcurl upload [filename]) to make sure file uploading works properly.

Run the script and give an argument with the path to the folder to be backed up. output.mp4 must be in the working directory.

Restoring a backup

There is currently no script for restoring backups. It must be done by hand. The procedure is to remove the first 1536 bytes (three 512-byte blocks) from the mp4 files downloaded from Flickr, then extract the encrypted archive parts using 7-Zip, and finally unpackaging the tarball. This can be done easily using dd. An example backup restore:

dd if=relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar.7z.001.mp4 of=relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar.7z.001 skip=3
dd if=relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar.7z.002.mp4 of=relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar.7z.002 skip=3
7za x relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar.7z.001
tar xf relative,path,to,folder,2018-03-04_08,06.tar

Note: using the command in the 7z man page 7za x -so directory.tar.7z | tar xf - will not work as the -so flag while piping to tar prevents the user from being able to enter the password to decrypt the archive.

Other Notes

Very limited testing has been done with this script. I threw it together for my own use.

It leaves behind many large files after it is run in the directory that it is run from.

This script can take a long time to run. Backing up a 2gb directory took about an hour on my system with my upload speed (about 6 mbps).