Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-57391989-250/dropbox-rival-space-monkey-puts-cloud-in-your-house/#ixzz1oX8i677s

by ivoflipse • 14 years ago

52 59 14 years ago

news.cnet.com

sek3• 14 years ago

This 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.

kijin3• 14 years ago

So, 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.

eli3• 14 years ago

It seems to be working ok for Spotify

andrewgodwin• 14 years ago

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.)

the_paul3• 14 years ago

It's not dissimilar to the legal ramifications of browsing HN, then. Look, encrypted data!

xQq84/+wpysSnUveVUX6592sHzGBptxysvtginJr2OFkDifXYtNCFg==

divtxt3• 14 years ago

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.

jtolds2• 14 years ago

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.

kijin3• 14 years ago

That would certainly help, but there's a limit to same-ISP peering. For example, I use a relatively small ISP, so not many people are going to be using the same ISP that I do. Even if you use a larger ISP, you're screwed if even a single person dumps 100GB/mo of data on your SpaceMonkey drive.

wmf4• 14 years ago

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

kokey• 14 years ago

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.

hndl2• 14 years ago

I 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.

eli3• 14 years ago

Dropbox is also kinda expensive. $125/year per user starts to add up if you've got a lot of users.

hndl2• 14 years ago

How did you arrive at $125/user? A link for the unaware?

typicalrunt2• 14 years ago

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 is useful if you need to collaborate and not worry about setup.

Insurance on your home always varies, but usually runs about $50-100 per month. And that's just the price you pay for when things are going well.

For me, there's a cost to peace of mind and the ability for me to save time in my life to do things other than maintenance.

FWIW, I look at Dropbox as a monthly insurance premium to ensure that my files will always be around and I don't need to worry that my in-home RAID server must blow up at any time.

dpark10• 14 years ago

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 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.

divtxt3• 14 years ago

I wish they had gone with At least 2 copies offsite - that was one of my first thoughts too.

Then I remember that I used to do backups at most once a year until I moved to the Mac and Time Machine.

(edit: clarify sentence)

dpark10• 14 years ago

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 fragments from a bunch of other machines, and each fragment is only on a couple of machines.

samstave2• 14 years ago

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.

mistercow• 14 years ago

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.

sachingulaya• 14 years ago

Happened at work last month. Everything from the mini-fridge to the monitors.

rickmb• 14 years ago

I would suggest they count on most people not using the full 1TB. Not really unusual.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

Maybe they're hoping compression helps a bit? Having said that, I reckon most people won't fill up their drives...

alenahemkova2• 14 years ago

Didn't Wuala use to do something like this? Except more for P2P file backup rather than sync?

jbellis3• 14 years ago

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.

alenahemkova2• 14 years ago

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.

cbs4• 14 years ago

This sounds awesome! I've been waiting to see a step this direction for a long time. For a lot of people dropbox is the best tool for files, but its ridiculous for the trip between two computers in the same room to have a layover in A3.

jpschorr• 14 years ago

That's why dropbox has lan sync: https://www.dropbox.com/help/137

cbs4• 14 years ago

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.

dpark10• 14 years ago

Actually, you know who could probably sell this? Comcast. Make a single device that serves as a cable modem and also has this storage angle built in as either a "free" service with the bundle or as a small upsell.

wmf4• 14 years ago

I think Comcast wants to reduce upstream congestion, not increase it.

Edit: I'm talking about upstream on the last mile.

dpark10• 14 years ago

Why? If anything, I'd expect them to have plenty of upstream bandwidth, given that typical traffic patterns are primarily downstream.

typicalrunt2• 14 years ago

Interesting idea, but this worries me:

When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It's actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system.

So 1TB is filled with other people's data? What about security? Dropbox had a simple security issue that potentially leaked all users' data. But now, the data is on your drive. You could mirror the drive ('dd') and try to break into other user's information without anyone suspecting anything.

Or what happens if someone stores child pr0n on SpaceMonkey, and it gets mirrored to your drive? Legally, are you now on the hook for possessing the information since it's on your device?

tomstokes• 14 years ago

Good question. The Space Monkey software mitigates these issues in two ways: First, all data is carefully encrypted before it ever leaves the user's Space Monkey device for replication across the network. This is obviously a key concern for all of our potential customers, so a lot of time has been spent getting this part right.

Second, the system breaks each file into many small blocks with built-in parity and other such redundancy measures. These blocks are then spread across many devices to both increase redundancy of the network and distribute the bandwidth usage fairly across nodes. As a result, you wouldn't really ever store any identifiable data from any one other customer.

Therefore, if the government wanted to seize evidence, they would gain nothing useful by seizing any Space Monkey device other than the suspect's, which contains the local cache of the user's own data.

the_paul3• 14 years ago

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 have no possibility of decrypting, um, the answer is "no".

kijin3• 14 years ago

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.

wmf4• 14 years ago

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.

jbellis3• 14 years ago

Upvoted, but I skimmed 5.1 and missed the "shown not to work" part. Can you be more specific?

wmf4• 14 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

Probably by preferring storage nodes on faster connections.

calanya• 14 years ago

I'm glad to see Dropbox as defining this space.

takinola• 14 years ago

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

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

And 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.

Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

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