Without much more technical detail, it's hard to say if this is technically sound, but I've never seen a tech project better suited to Kickstarter. Here's a product that absolutely depends on having lots of early adopters, and using Kickstarter means that unless it has those adopters, you won't be investing in its inevitable failure.
How big is the hard drive in there? Judging from the price, the disk inside can't be much bigger than 2TB. That means if I have 1 TB of data and all the other have 1TB of their own data, it can only "replicated" exactly once (unless there are dedicated "cloud" servers involved), Which means, if my device breaks all devices which received a portion of my data need to be online for me to restore the content.
How does the encryption work? Surely the AES key can't be stored on the device - if it breaks your data is lost. If it's stored in the cloud it's not any safer than cloud storage.
Your argument is mostly valid, but it assumes a couple of premises that are likely to be false:
1. All (or even most) users fully utilize their entire 1 TB quota. In reality, the vast majority of users will probably not even use half of their quota. By the time that changes, hard drive technology is likely to have advanced, and they can start selling larger boxes. Then the cycle repeats.
2. The data on the drives is not compressible. While people certainly could store only compressed files, that's not very convenient, and the reality is that most people will have at least some portion of content that is readily compressible.
Just by exploiting those two facts, the network can probably work without any external cloud assistance. But the smart way to design it would be to also have traditional cloud storage as a fallback. And that would be safer than traditional cloud storage, while still saving money since the fallback would only be used in special circumstances.
Perhaps they encrypt your unique personal files, but share duplicates among all the users? In one tb, there must be a lot of common mp3s, movie files, etc.
I think this is a step both in the right direction, and the wrong direction. This attempts to mitigate issues with cloud storage by giving you hardware to keep (actually a really good idea! It reduces latency and allows for file recovery) but the service is still controlled by a company/central hub. If the hub fails, the system fails. We need a system that works fully distributively (and preferably open source so anybody can add more nodes)
Also, there's really no reason for this to be a special device. It easily be a blob on your computer's hard drive. An availability problem for laptops, but you'd best have that problem solved anyway since residential internet connections aren't exactly 100% uptime affairs.
File stores like this have been pretty common place for a long time now actually -- systems like Freenet, WASTE, etc.
Interesting to see someone stepping up and delivering a consumer-friendly experience on top of such technology. It's incredibly useful but reliant on a healthy network of peers. A plug-in-and-forget solution with good clients that integrate well into the ecosystem of devices we use today, I think, is very clever.
I'd prefer to see something open-source but this is definitely a step in an interesting direction. Personally I limit my use of "cloud," services because I don't trust other people hosting things like my contacts list, calendar appointments, etc. I do see the benefit and convenience of such services though and if this device/service is capable of synchronizing more of that data from my applications between my devices I would buy into it in a heartbeat.
I hope the kickstarter goes well and this thing takes off (or something similar... again, open source is preferable).
It isn't quite obvious from the kickstarter, but it doesn't seem to be decentralized and anonymous like Freenet (dont know about WASTE), which I thought was the main point of Freenet.
How much of your terabyte is yours? The duplication seems to be at least three times (more?), so that would be 333GB. Note: it doesn't matter how finely you cut it up, you need duplication to avoid loss.
It can be ameliorated by the cloud tricks of compression and git-like copy-detection across nodes (people downloaded the same movie, music, image, document, software etc) giving aggregate savings.
Of course, most people won't use their full quota initially, and meanwhile more adopters come online with fresh excess capacity... a kind of ponzi-scheme/chain-letter (to be fair, as drive prices fall over years, units will likely become 2TB, 4TB etc).
except you can't deduplicate against what other people have backed up (multiple people backing up the same movie, etc) and encrypt your backups. If my backups are being put on a device owned by someone else, I want that encrypted so they can't read it.
from the kickstarter page "For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time". the devices' actual capacity is larger.
I met these guys when they launched at either Calacanis' Launch.co or Arrington's Disrupt. I remember them winning the event too.
Good idea, but I question the scalability of the solution. How does deduplication work on remote devices if you have a lot of them. Is there a checksum of the file against a central server? Curious.
They launched and won the Launch Conference. That doesn't necessarily de-risk their plans from a technical perspective, but they got some validation from those who vetted the team and product already on the conference and judges panel side of things.
Peer to peer backup? Reminds me too much of Skype Supernodes.
The premise is sound but in reality you're paying $10 a month to help distribute other people's data via your own bandwidth? This goes both ways, of course, but how long until someone finds a way to make their SpaceMonkey exclusively a network leecher, only fragmenting owner's backup but not delivering other people's data?
I could be entirely wrong, of course, someone correct me please.
Doesn't need to be "hacked" - you just need to constantly churn your 1TB while someone else puts 500MB up and adds a photo a month. Effectively you are leeching.
Correct me if I am wriong but this is storing data as torrents and each device is a torrent client and store box?
There's really no question about whether or not it will get funded in my mind; the early-bird option alone (which is half sold out) will take them to 50K - half of their goal. I bet this funds today.
I suspect this as well - the part where they talk about "even if half of the remaining nodes disappeared" makes me think that a Tahoe (or tahoe style) technology is behind this.
Interestingly, the Tahoe people have their own product to offer:
No. Although being a distributed network with similar reliability and availability and performance requirements, there are some similar technologies/approaches at play.
I'm waiting for the day that a hacker takes over their central update server and bricks all devices worldwide and makes them non-upgradable (or makes them into bots).
How would you deal with that? Ask them all to send it in?
Not sure if I like this. $10/month for a TB is the same as Amazon glacier. Sure that's not the same since Glacier is for archival but still... It's not THAT cheap.
(a) I think that's the same problem that all consumer devices have that "phone home" for updates; game consoles, TiVos, smart TVs, VoIP phone adapters, etc.
(b) If all you need is archiving of your stuff, and you don't want ongoing fast access to your movies, music, photos, etc., then sure. Glacier is probably a better fit.
Why would I want this? I can use CrashPlan to backup my files to the 'cloud' safely. I don't care where it's stored, as long as it's safe. For fast access and high availability I could just buy a hard drive instead of a device that acts like a hard drive but instead stores other people's files on it.
If all you want are backups, then no, I don't imagine this is very compelling.
The idea is to actually access these files regularly from more than one computer. Hence the web interface and the emphasis on mobile devices. It could also serve as a media library for various devices, not just in your home, but presumably anywhere.
Dropbox and plenty of others basically do this already, but $10/mo at Dropbox only gets you 100GB. And I don't think it does streaming, though I could be wrong.
Personally, I'm curious how they access the files externally. The device must act as a server, I suppose, but it seems like firewalls would present an issue to less technical people. Maybe they just assume those people would never buy this?
This option probably wins on cost and ease of use. For technically-minded people that can afford CrashPlan, though, this product may not be compelling; that's okay. Not all products are right for all people.
Why is this a subscription pricing model?.. if all the data is stored on peers Space Monkeys, then the only ongoing cost of keeping it running is electricity for the unit and bandwidth for the connection.
Unless it's a way to draw out more money over time from the user?
Yeah, Space Monkey is a business, and we hope to be able to make at least some money off the whole deal in the end.
But also yes, there are nontrivial ongoing costs to keeping the network working and working right. For example, we need dedicated online servers to allow NATted devices to talk to each other, coordinate storage use, and deploy security patches and bugfixes, and we want to add more features over time.
So if I'm interacting with other users' devices, why am I paying $10/month?
This seems like a great (nay, genius) idea if you just buy a device that accepts a standard 3.5 inch HD, half the space is yours, half is for distributed backup, no monthly fees, just the upfront $ for the box itself..
While engineer in me loves edge distributed and duplicated shards of encrypted data, does the business model hold up against the economies of the giant cloud providers doing it all in a few of their data centers?
Sounds interesting, but I'd want to know what the estimates are for up/down bandwidth monthly. US data caps are common and tech like that could suck them up pretty quickly...
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|13 years ago|reply
How big is the hard drive in there? Judging from the price, the disk inside can't be much bigger than 2TB. That means if I have 1 TB of data and all the other have 1TB of their own data, it can only "replicated" exactly once (unless there are dedicated "cloud" servers involved), Which means, if my device breaks all devices which received a portion of my data need to be online for me to restore the content.
How does the encryption work? Surely the AES key can't be stored on the device - if it breaks your data is lost. If it's stored in the cloud it's not any safer than cloud storage.
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
1. All (or even most) users fully utilize their entire 1 TB quota. In reality, the vast majority of users will probably not even use half of their quota. By the time that changes, hard drive technology is likely to have advanced, and they can start selling larger boxes. Then the cycle repeats.
2. The data on the drives is not compressible. While people certainly could store only compressed files, that's not very convenient, and the reality is that most people will have at least some portion of content that is readily compressible.
Just by exploiting those two facts, the network can probably work without any external cloud assistance. But the smart way to design it would be to also have traditional cloud storage as a fallback. And that would be safer than traditional cloud storage, while still saving money since the fallback would only be used in special circumstances.
[+] [-] ryankshaw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rhapso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agentultra|13 years ago|reply
Interesting to see someone stepping up and delivering a consumer-friendly experience on top of such technology. It's incredibly useful but reliant on a healthy network of peers. A plug-in-and-forget solution with good clients that integrate well into the ecosystem of devices we use today, I think, is very clever.
I'd prefer to see something open-source but this is definitely a step in an interesting direction. Personally I limit my use of "cloud," services because I don't trust other people hosting things like my contacts list, calendar appointments, etc. I do see the benefit and convenience of such services though and if this device/service is capable of synchronizing more of that data from my applications between my devices I would buy into it in a heartbeat.
I hope the kickstarter goes well and this thing takes off (or something similar... again, open source is preferable).
[+] [-] dreen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6ren|13 years ago|reply
It can be ameliorated by the cloud tricks of compression and git-like copy-detection across nodes (people downloaded the same movie, music, image, document, software etc) giving aggregate savings.
Of course, most people won't use their full quota initially, and meanwhile more adopters come online with fresh excess capacity... a kind of ponzi-scheme/chain-letter (to be fair, as drive prices fall over years, units will likely become 2TB, 4TB etc).
[+] [-] varikin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_paul|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryankshaw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josh2600|13 years ago|reply
Good idea, but I question the scalability of the solution. How does deduplication work on remote devices if you have a lot of them. Is there a checksum of the file against a central server? Curious.
[+] [-] jonathanjaeger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notum|13 years ago|reply
I could be entirely wrong, of course, someone correct me please.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|13 years ago|reply
Correct me if I am wriong but this is storing data as torrents and each device is a torrent client and store box?
[+] [-] austenallred|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|13 years ago|reply
Interestingly, the Tahoe people have their own product to offer:
https://leastauthority.com/
... although I have no idea what state of production that is in ...
[+] [-] the_paul|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] susi22|13 years ago|reply
Not sure if I like this. $10/month for a TB is the same as Amazon glacier. Sure that's not the same since Glacier is for archival but still... It's not THAT cheap.
[+] [-] the_paul|13 years ago|reply
(b) If all you need is archiving of your stuff, and you don't want ongoing fast access to your movies, music, photos, etc., then sure. Glacier is probably a better fit.
[+] [-] rheide|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryusage|13 years ago|reply
The idea is to actually access these files regularly from more than one computer. Hence the web interface and the emphasis on mobile devices. It could also serve as a media library for various devices, not just in your home, but presumably anywhere.
Dropbox and plenty of others basically do this already, but $10/mo at Dropbox only gets you 100GB. And I don't think it does streaming, though I could be wrong.
Personally, I'm curious how they access the files externally. The device must act as a server, I suppose, but it seems like firewalls would present an issue to less technical people. Maybe they just assume those people would never buy this?
[+] [-] apendleton|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asm89|13 years ago|reply
- options to pair up with specific other devices for the backups (family, trusted friends etc)
- a web app for posting status updates etc (implementing tent.io?)
Basically the things social networks offer now, but with you owning your own data.
[+] [-] RoryH|13 years ago|reply
Unless it's a way to draw out more money over time from the user?
[+] [-] the_paul|13 years ago|reply
But also yes, there are nontrivial ongoing costs to keeping the network working and working right. For example, we need dedicated online servers to allow NATted devices to talk to each other, coordinate storage use, and deploy security patches and bugfixes, and we want to add more features over time.
[+] [-] JustinAiken|13 years ago|reply
This seems like a great (nay, genius) idea if you just buy a device that accepts a standard 3.5 inch HD, half the space is yours, half is for distributed backup, no monthly fees, just the upfront $ for the box itself..
[+] [-] gz5|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbellis|13 years ago|reply
Upload, where bandwidth limits are the worst, is almost entirely based on replicating data you've added to Space Monkey.
(I have an alpha Space Monkey device.)
[+] [-] antr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silasb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politician|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siculars|13 years ago|reply