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Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

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Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#11
post #9

I have some concerns on the 2 sentences (from their website): - "We've developed proprietary de-duplication and compression technology to be able to give you unlimited storage" - "Your files are encrypted with AES-256 bit encryption" I'd prefer to know that my data is not encrypted, rather than reading marketing sentences that have none or obscure meaning when read together.

Actually, you can use convergent encryption to dedup encrypted files. It leaks information (because I can tell whether a file that I possess already exists on the server if the server is silly enough to tell me that it took no space/time) but it is indeed encrypted.

Check out this discussion of Mega for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072680

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#13
post #9

I have some concerns on the 2 sentences (from their website): - "We've developed proprietary de-duplication and compression technology to be able to give you unlimited storage" - "Your files are encrypted with AES-256 bit encryption" I'd prefer to know that my data is not encrypted, rather than reading marketing sentences that have none or obscure meaning when read together.

Happy to clarify. We use convergent encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_encryption), which works with our de-duplication.

Example: You and I both have a file A. Our software encrypts that file A with a unique key generated from the file (say, the MD5 hash of the file), which makes E(A). Every user that uploads file A will generate the same encrypted version E(A) because the encryption key will be the same across each user (the MD5 hash of A).

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#14
Does anyone actually have experience with this? It sounds like one of those "there has to be a catch" type services.

Any limits on filetypes? Is there a max size per file? How is the network speed? Do they fire any customers who use too much storage space and/or bandwidth?

What is stopping my company from encrypting our database backups and uploading them to Streem nightly for permanent storage at a fraction of the price of normal offsite backups?

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#15
post #9

I have some concerns on the 2 sentences (from their website): - "We've developed proprietary de-duplication and compression technology to be able to give you unlimited storage" - "Your files are encrypted with AES-256 bit encryption" I'd prefer to know that my data is not encrypted, rather than reading marketing sentences that have none or obscure meaning when read together.

I wonder if the compression technology is as good as Pied Piper's.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#16
post #8

How can it de-dupe properly if it is truly encrypted? Also, it's not unlimited storage for $20/month, it's only 200GB for $20/month. Not nearly cheap enough for use with movies / music IMO

Encryption is done through convergent encryption (example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601277).

We do offer unlimited storage for $20/month, the 200GB for $20 is what Dropbox offers -- sorry if that was unclear.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#18
post #14

Does anyone actually have experience with this? It sounds like one of those "there has to be a catch" type services. Any limits on filetypes? Is there a max size per file? How is the network speed? Do they fire any customers who use too much storage space and/or bandwidth? What is stopping my company from encrypting our database backups and uploading them to Streem nightly for permanent storage at a fraction of the p…

We're limiting filetypes to media files (videos, photos, music, docs), so you can't pipe in petabytes of garbage dumps of random data. So in your case, we wouldn't be able to accept your database backup, but would be fine for your media files.

No max file size limit.

We have CDNs around the world to help with network speeds. Of course, that's a vague answer for now, but we're gathering more data on upload/download speeds as we let more users in and will have more information on this in the near future.

Definitely not planning on firing anyone for using too much. The only case we'd ask someone to stop using our service would be if they're abusing our policies (i.e. 100 people on one account). So far we've been fine with an "expected value" type system -- some people will store/stream a lot, and some won't, but overall it all works out so that the $20/month price point works out just fine.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#19

Can I store RAW photo files on this storage?

Absolutely! We're also testing out our Javascript RAW image viewer so you can browse your RAW images without any special software, directly on the web, and on any computer.
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