ZumoDrive is going to change everything

http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/01/zumodrive_is_going_to_change_everything.html

by echair • 18 years ago

21 42 18 years ago

tptacek3• 18 years ago

$60/mo to put my whole "200gb" iTunes library "in the cloud", or the same amount of money to buy a much larger storage appliance for my home.

cperciva2• 18 years ago

Agreed. As someone who sells online backups by the byte, I should be trying to get people to back up all the data they have -- but as I routinely point out to people, some stuff really doesn't need offsite backup. If your house burns down, there are lots of things you're going to be upset about losing; a collection of downloaded MP3s probably isn't one of them.

guruz3• 18 years ago

I disagree. Losing my MP3 collection would mean losing part of my identity I had over the years.

It's really interesting/funny to look at the different stuff and say to yourself "Did I really like this? Did I really go to concerts from these bands?"

But of course, the cat/dog and the girlfriend would need to get out of the burning appartment first :)

But 60 USD? Probably not. :)

tptacek3• 18 years ago

On the contrary, one of the top 5 things I do want backed up is my MP3s; I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. But I probably don't want to back them up over the Internet.

davidz• 18 years ago

Even though cloud storage is getting cheaper, it's still not as cheap as off of the shelf hard drives (yet). But then again, you can't access your hard drive from anywhere, and it's not stored at geographically different locations.

Then when it comes to your mobile devices, sometimes it's not possible to add additional capacity. You are paying for something different than a hard drive. Cloud storage will get cheaper, just as the harddrives have

guruz3• 18 years ago

How can it be cheaper as off the shelf drives if data centers also only use commodity off the shelf drives?

(probably from wholesale, though)

inovica• 18 years ago

Even paying for the software and additional technology this looks expensive to me. Amazon S3 price for this would be $20/month for the storage (plus transfer costs of $0.15/gb) so I think it could be cheaper

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

Exactly. Buy storage, hook up mobile device to it over a VPN, then map a network drive - done, exactly same end result, but no cloud dependency and no recurrent monthly fees.

andrewtj• 18 years ago

Perhaps if you're in a connectivity rich part of the world this cloud storage and computing stuff is alluring but for those of us with imperfect connectivity it represents more inconvenience not less.

jhancock2• 18 years ago

absolutely. Try using this from China ;).

toisanji• 18 years ago

just wondering, are you in china, I currently am in guangzhou.

markessien• 18 years ago

ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. There was an app exectly like this back in 2001 or so. Back then, it did not work because the connections were too slow and space was not cheap enough - at the moment, it will not work for those same reasons.

There is no doubt that there are a lot of people who will use this - but it's not yet ready for mainstream. It's much easier to store you stuff on an external hard drive than on Zumo, and till it becomes easier, this will not really hit.

The startup will be profitable very quickly, they will gain hundreds of thousands of users, but ZumoDrive does not represent any big change in computing... for now.

fauigerzigerk7• 18 years ago

It seems to me the fundamental question is whether the amount of data or reliably available bandwidth grows faster.

jerf4• 18 years ago

Right now, data is cleaning bandwidth's clock. My internet connection is just barely faster than five years ago, but now I want to ship around pictures, music, and movies wholesale, whereas back then I really didn't care. I'd estimate two orders of magnitude of increase in my data desires... and I was a power user five years ago (as well as today, though epic torrenters have me beat). My wife has gone from email and web browsing to shipping around video, too, for her it could be even more.

Is it feasible to expect data growth to level off long term? Tough to say. Audio probably won't grow much, but pictures and movies can get a lot bigger, but eventually you have enough resolution. But in the fuzzy long term, there are other possibilities for large-scale data movement that are harder to predict.

That's because processing power is no contest. Local processing power is growing radically faster than anything else, and this will continue. Local processing power is growing so radically faster that it has long since penetrated the architecture itself, and we now have deep, deep memory cache architectures desperately trying to catch up to the increase in local processing power... even reaching out five inches as opposed to five nanometers has a huge performance impact.

If you want to take advantage of that, you're going to move data closer to the processor. Processors are quite likely to live in the home, for a variety of legal and technical reasons. (The updated version of rms' Right to Read story is the Right to Compute Locally... long term, you are a fool of epic proportions to give up all computational power to the owners of the cloud!) Due to some fundamental latency issues, and the fact the cloud will always be partially underprovisioned due to simple economic reality, there may still be a desire to move large amounts of data around in the future. Bandwidth is hard, and easily consumed.

(And while I'm here, since I've built the foundation: I don't think the cloud is the total future for these reasons. The cloud will never be able to be as reliable as local resources, because the cloud will always be distant, latent (as in latency), and busy. Local resources backing to the cloud is a far, far better proposition than a pure-cloud-with-dumb-terminals-everywhere play.)

seshagiric• 18 years ago

ZumoDrive is not going to change anything. From box.net to liveMesh there are simple to complex solutions. With Live Mesh you not only can access your 'share' from anywhere you can also remote login to your home PC from anywhere and vice versa (yeah access office PC from home even across firewall).

tdavis2• 18 years ago

I like ZumoDrive, but I can't understand why anybody in their right mind would want all of their stuff in "the cloud". I'm still not comfortable with anything in the cloud, though I cautiously make an exception with Zumo because I want all my music everywhere, dammit.

To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything. And it surely should not be considered secure, unless all my data is heavily encrypted in transit and storage.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything.

This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and the power doesn't glitch.

The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.

You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of work, and I'm always behind.

As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives (except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing Happy Birthday.

tdavis2• 18 years ago

I should have clarified: I think online backups are a great idea (provided they're encrypted archives). The author of the article says, quote, I don’t want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their data WITH them is living in the wrong century.

This is a different thing entirely. He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium, which I find incredibly preposterous. The "century" doesn't matter; the Internet is nowhere near ubiquitous around the globe, and I imagine it never truly will be. Of course there are other concerns: bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies, etc.

I'll be the first to admit that if you burnt down my apartment right now, the only stuff that would be saved is code for projects I'm currently tracking. I do hourly backups, but they're all done to a local drive. Everyone, including me, should have off-site backups if they have important information on their computer hard drives. That's something I think everyone could agree on.

ZumoDrive is going to change everything

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