I would love to see a Time machine equivalent for Windows. I already have a 2TB storage device at home but pretty much every local backup/sync service sucks cojones. I'd gladly pay a flat fee for a product that does this
Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#42So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're eff…
ISPs pay for bandwidth leaving and entering their network. inter-network bandwidth is actually free for them, so it's very likely spacemonkey could prefer peering with other users on the same ISP.
Upstream bandwidth on DOCSIS causes congestion that requires capex (node splits) to fix, so it's definitely not free. See http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/74/slides/alto-1.pdf
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvoted, but I skimmed 5.1 and missed the "shown not to work" part. Can you be more specific?
Whenever a device fails or goes offline, the data that was stored there needs to be re-replicated from the source. But figure 6 shows that even with a 2 Mbps "turbo" uplink you can only replicate ~25 GB; if you have more data than that, replicas will fail faster than you can recreate them.
Sounds like that's addressed by storing pieces of data from many sources in the non-local part of space monkey storage: even if each source only has a 256K uplink, multiply that by 100 or 1000 and you're in pretty good shape.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#44Didn't Wuala use to do something like this? Except more for P2P file backup rather than sync?
P2P backup / sync has been done before (allmydata is another example from longer ago). It's that plus the appliance that makes Space Monkey unique, IMO.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#45And here I thought it was an actually solid rival to dropbox you could install in your own servers and enjoy the same level of functionaly.
Yes I know there are some hacks around using FTP apps to get a similar experience, but is not the same, is still clunky, sometimes too buggy, and let alone the average dropbox user wouldn't be able to even read the instructions, let alone put it together.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the most straightforward possible applications for cryptography in data storage- no worries about key negotiation or cipher negotiation or PKI infrastructures. And yes, they're encrypting your data before sending it anywhere- that's pretty explicitly mentioned everywhere the service is explained. So, if you're asking whether you're legally liable for the content of data on your hard drive which you hav…
Depending on the jurisdiction, you might still be liable for other people's encrypted data stored in your property. Whether anyone can prove that you have any particular piece of incriminating data is a different story of course, but law enforcement agencies in certain countries have a nasty tendency to skip proofs.
I submit that you're probably screwed anyway in those countries and/or jurisdictions, whether or not you have someone else's unreadable contraband. :)
In fact, here's an exercise. The following data represents a base64-encoded encrypted image:
qipN5pKHq+CCBm+yfHz0Y/NmkLd+1GjuowopHYWs3qjo6wuPsrulOBZJUXGt tsc465cM9p2qUZvKYxt/5M+2+zkjdbNMi447cLY4KUw3Xb934KDkyrviZYkh gryO3C5cPw0ZVitr/6e3pyQiEGga4SwbskCQhMw7XlqDYJowpCs/Qsh8ZQiR 2/+zQ/CGhYfU37dIQYVzqPCM7y5DHcDePGvzx2BCzu8OQThLnMWGiz5kODzY 49zrfoTQg8W0NKIC7rD529CnPVyfQok+u8L8LGqZSbOh2CUygWIF3mjmTGtd EnUBrkI49aVjeEa9/anCUw2nBRbmWWZZ5p1bvDYHGkEtlaFTJrSfVnuejBa1 NqNdMFIU6qAlpJ75Js8O2+jNi+qbVE/JUjYFtB45mf0B/E4GXbBcjg/gWhSi LvTOX7P8+HDMhg8jB2nnJ2Yf3l2CPopjKczWGZMUu3P8jamdp2kv67q0kIrE xGc3sr8r8R78StuQUVpp+5SexykhDOMQGowdBQ2yLYtRtoNDlWm47x7agM8i YP70n4wLhwZ03JH+2WmmVLVx2Yk4AZIU4t7XfdaoYaC33U58QeSaBJ4fdsJO PBp1L559jJTRrBk996gLN7V0oQSRMCWF67KezK3Bk2a07vzxjiXfwJOB5BDl ooSvoTdu5Slv9C+aIoa4ade7r7umC8Ac84XCfBY/UlmWIq0VogXuzOzZ2WkX 0uUpCnz2WX3rShKFFd8w9HhoxsOaR2S3sFbL7foqpx9SXYYjpM2vJHpEjMFQ W7Xmqlvb/2m1aUB2f6qFmqKPjo5/zIAOl90YDoDaQSin9C9/X6WRydHHcu1/ mrjo5LSdfouqOwVXMDnh95/YPvSGdO8GP35pRKUceidM4oYyQCRYGb3xKn0O TP/jKy3MXz/CeZsbxQtobq1DlC6NVVp5UifQM72ufdI5xcqObQSECFXKTTtt FuGdg+ZQ/0yLQ6WQde1B44LJML0MWIYPjrO74tOiCn4VZEsC9lakMMJZ2Qyp M1BRsh7xeQ0eVMOCEe5+yDV45uvchoGyAZsr2qTcgqTCKm4U9r1PUqBjWUjS AkVE3uIHjwL7D+gDvRuvNk4PdHpUX0p+oLp2ATmcR+TmhSNL8UEuAAw1ajgH SlhtS/BdXWkC5SFbfp6Dvt+WD+/2CwAZGgImAWXPv0YM+za80Q99au4NPR+L +KQW2wjChNkEKau9Jq5uGf36Vnt08dxVRoWzsWcPHmlFquXQrsBVsbe2Yu6v EfTAwaxFUB1kgLdTWJlxObfiBtzwf855yIggNcJZ9b/e9k6NpdJbCBYQJElf RN5qYGh4A6ASpZgZa86e2nPHvIJprm7IN9uqiI2EP9fPQp+zLorNKwxnZkv7 W//D28p0Wy5tS5F5p2ee7QI=
Is it pr0n? Is it an image of US gov't classified data? Is it hate speech? Who knows, but now it's on your computer. There are a lot of other ways someone could get data onto your computer without you knowing if it has a particular meaning.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain. And looks like it doesn't have lan-only drives, I maintain a box serving up samba shares specifically because the work files in a specific project work files would blow my bandwidth cap for the month in 2 round trips.
> That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain. Are those actual big catches? Those seem like pretty reasonable constraints. What machine do you have attached to your LAN that can't access the internet? And the network restriction is probably just fine for >99% of their customers.
I know its not going to impact the vast majority of their users, so they don't have to care. For my uses, they're all pretty big. That's why I'm so happy to see a new product that may fit into those situations better. Not every computer is on a SOHO network, or a network with many properties of the same.
The network I'm on most of the time is huge which means its heavily subnetted and no one user gets great throughput. My apartment has the aforementioned cap. My old man's place has no internet connection at all, just wifi for getting files to the media computer connected to the TV. By building a product that can serve these users, they'll have a product that can better serve users on ideal connections too!
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#48So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're eff…
Not to mention the obvious legal ramifications, even of encrypted data - in the UK, it's a crime not to give up the key to encrypted data, even if you claim to not have it (though I would hope in this case it's provable you really never did, and that would somehow help.)
It's not dissimilar to the legal ramifications of browsing HN, then. Look, encrypted data!
xQq84/+wpysSnUveVUX6592sHzGBptxysvtginJr2OFkDifXYtNCFg==
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#49So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're eff…
It's funny, it's just as the world started to become more sane again by storing data centrally now we have a company that will bring us back to storing things locally and share it out on links that at the last mile are not implemented to be full duplex. The economics of this is just wrong, and hopefully it won't take off.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox is also kinda expensive. $125/year per user starts to add up if you've got a lot of users.
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…
I was actually thinking of B2B. $125/user isn't a lot for one person, but it is for 50. And I would imagine most businesses have some (worse) system for sharing files already...