Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#2This is a great idea for the long term. There will always be a need for something like this, as an alternative to the cloud. Dropbox should have come up with this, to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Sounds like a good acquisition candidate.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#3So, 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 effectively pushing their costs onto ISPs, who in turn will push their costs onto customers. Restoring backups is also going to be pretty slow if your data is stored on somebody's 10M/1M DSL line. They'd better market it in countries where everyone has 100M and no bandwidth caps.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#4I think this is a great idea but I think Dropbox has a pretty well established brand name. My guess is that most people aren't going to find the need to switch. The ones who might make the switch are the paranoid folks who would think this is some sort of more secure way to sync.
The idea is nice but the challenge, IMO, will be in marketing this.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#5So, 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 seems to be working ok for Spotify
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#6I think this is a great idea but I think Dropbox has a pretty well established brand name. My guess is that most people aren't going to find the need to switch. The ones who might make the switch are the paranoid folks who would think this is some sort of more secure way to sync. The idea is nice but the challenge, IMO, will be in marketing this.
Dropbox is also kinda expensive. $125/year per user starts to add up if you've got a lot of users.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#7So, 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.)
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#8They give me half of a 2TB drive? Doesn't that mean that I'm getting only one copy of my data stored outside my house? So if a power surge fries my equipment, there's one copy of my data spread across a couple dozen other machines. I guess that's fine as long as no one but me experiences any failures...
It's possible that they're just overselling, and they expect most people to use only a couple hundred megs, which would allow lots of redundancy. If so, that seems like a really bad idea, since heavy usage of an on-site disk is likely (let's back up all these pirated movies!), and their buildout requires either signing up new customers or swapping devices, neither of which is quick or cheap.
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#9Didn't Wuala use to do something like this? Except more for P2P file backup rather than sync?
Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house
#10So, 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…
Yes, bandwidth is a concern, but it should be easy to let users choose bandwidth limits. The question then is whether the product is still useful if it takes 10/20/30 months to fill the hard drive. I suspect that there's a segment of the population for which it will.