Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

Interesting idea, but this worries me:

When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It's actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system.

So 1TB is filled with other people's data? What about security? Dropbox had a simple security issue that potentially leaked all users' data. But now, the data is on your drive. You could mirror the drive ('dd') and try to break into other user's information without anyone suspecting anything.

Or what happens if someone stores child pr0n on SpaceMonkey, and it gets mirrored to your drive? Legally, are you now on the hook for possessing the information since it's on your device?

It depends on your financial situation in life. Instead of thinking "expensive" versus "cheap" -- because they're just words with no clear definition -- you need to think about the cost for what you are getting.

$125/year is just over $10/month. Nowadays in the US/UK/Canada, that's about 2 cups of coffee at Starbucks.

For that price, you are receiving 1TB of backup space for yourself.

Each person is $10/month, which is useful if you need to collaborate and not worry about setup.

Insurance on your home always varies, but usually runs about $50-100 per month. And that's just the price you pay for when things are going well.

For me, there's a cost to peace of mind and the ability for me to save time in my life to do things other than maintenance.

FWIW, I look at Dropbox as a monthly insurance premium to ensure that my files will always be around and I don't need to worry that my in-home RAID server must blow up at any time.

Upvoted, but I skimmed 5.1 and missed the "shown not to work" part. Can you be more specific?

Why? If anything, I'd expect them to have plenty of upstream bandwidth, given that typical traffic patterns are primarily downstream.

Good question. The Space Monkey software mitigates these issues in two ways: First, all data is carefully encrypted before it ever leaves the user's Space Monkey device for replication across the network. This is obviously a key concern for all of our potential customers, so a lot of time has been spent getting this part right.

Second, the system breaks each file into many small blocks with built-in parity and other such redundancy measures. These blocks are then spread across many devices to both increase redundancy of the network and distribute the bandwidth usage fairly across nodes. As a result, you wouldn't really ever store any identifiable data from any one other customer.

Therefore, if the government wanted to seize evidence, they would gain nothing useful by seizing any Space Monkey device other than the suspect's, which contains the local cache of the user's own data.