Didn'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.
IIRC what wuala did was give people more storage if they give up a part of their hard drive for other to sync with, so it's exactly the same model except without external hardware and more flexibility in choosing how much storage you want to trade off.
Wuala also keep a centralize server in addition to this P2P cloud so I think the purpose of the cloud was more for bandwidth.
They 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 w…
In my 25 years using computers, I have never once had any piece of equipment fried by a power surge. I have had things fail, sure - but never by a power surge.
Happened at work last month. Everything from the mini-fridge to the monitors.
This has been shown not to work: http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/TFS.pdf (section 5.1) I wonder how they think they're getting around the upstream replication bottleneck.
Probably by preferring storage nodes on faster connections.
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.
IIRC what wuala did was give people more storage if they give up a part of their hard drive for other to sync with, so it's exactly the same model except without external hardware and more flexibility in choosing how much storage you want to trade off. Wuala also keep a centralize server in addition to this P2P cloud so I think the purpose of the cloud was more for bandwidth.
it's one thing to pay money and gain space, but it's another thing to pay money and lose disk space you have. i feel like people are more likely to pick the former.
How do they guarantee at least two offsite copies? That would require that they give everyone 1TB out of 3TB. Unless they're also storing on their own servers, in which case the consumer-housed device seems pointless. And two copies is still pretty low for flaky infrastructure. They're basically setting up your data as a torrent cloud, except there are no seeds if you lose your equipment, so you're trying to download…
What I meant was: I wish they had gone with at least 2 copies offsite. Sorry for the ambiguity. And you're right - 2 copies would mean 1TB out of 3TB.
In my 25 years using computers, I have never once had any piece of equipment fried by a power surge. I have had things fail, sure - but never by a power surge.
You've never had lightning take out equipment? I envy you. Few things are worse than hearing a crack, having the lights go out, and then smelling burning circuit boards.
I am sure it's due to geography. Looks like ill be in Dallas for the next 2 years on a project - so my experience may change :)
> 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 throughpu…
I don't really see how this product makes any sense for the scenarios you're describing. This system still needs to be able to hit the Internet at reasonable speed, or else you get no offsite backup. It just becomes a network-attached hard drive, and if that's what you want, you can buy one at a better price with more storage (and it won't waste your bandwidth trying to be a "cloud" for your data or anyone else's data).
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 throughpu…
I don't really see how this product makes any sense for the scenarios you're describing. This system still needs to be able to hit the Internet at reasonable speed, or else you get no offsite backup. It just becomes a network-attached hard drive, and if that's what you want, you can buy one at a better price with more storage (and it won't waste your bandwidth trying to be a "cloud" for your data or anyone else's dat…
My original post was that this is a step in the right direction. From one thing I happened to mention, this thread took a tangent about dropbox's lan sync, but thats not specifically or only the area I care about. There is a place I'd like to see file storage tech to go, and we are inching towards it, but its not delivered with an off the shelf NAS box, dropbox or simple combination of the two.
I don't really see how this product makes any sense for the scenarios you're describing. This system still needs to be able to hit the Internet at reasonable speed, or else you get no offsite backup. It just becomes a network-attached hard drive, and if that's what you want, you can buy one at a better price with more storage (and it won't waste your bandwidth trying to be a "cloud" for your data or anyone else's dat…
My original post was that this is a step in the right direction. From one thing I happened to mention, this thread took a tangent about dropbox's lan sync, but thats not specifically or only the area I care about. There is a place I'd like to see file storage tech to go, and we are inching towards it, but its not delivered with an off the shelf NAS box, dropbox or simple combination of the two.
I guess I'm not clear what your ideal product would be. All of the scenarios you describe have very constrained bandwidth, which means that sync outside the LAN will always be crappy. It sounds like you either need NAS or peer-to-peer sync (something like Mesh or AeroFS).