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[DirtyDog]

Yeah so cloud is quite expensive for a whole TB.

Dropbox $15/month x 5 users = $75 a month
Amazon S3 = 0.085 per GB = $85

A USB harddrive or even quite an upmarket NAS is clearly a lot more cost effective.

I appreciate that time is of the essence, but Space Monkey should be shipping internationally soon. You get a 1TB drive and it then replicates the drive contents in pieces to other Space Monkey customers around the world. So you get the cloud storage for a fraction of the price of going to Dropbox / Amazon / anyone else.

I'm still waiting for mine, which I backed via Kickstarter last year.

[stek]

BitTorrent sync is free and unlimited. Beta though...

[Pondlife]

I appreciate that time is of the essence, but Space Monkey should be shipping internationally soon. You get a 1TB drive and it then replicates the drive contents in pieces to other Space Monkey customers around the world. So you get the cloud storage for a fraction of the price of going to Dropbox / Amazon / anyone else.

I'm still waiting for mine, which I backed via Kickstarter last year.

How does this work DD? I've had a brief looky and still not clear. I'm assuming it's similar to P2P/torrent seeding?

Is a portion of your 1TB allocated for storing bits of everyone else's data? Will you also have your upload speed throttled by everyone accessing their online data stored on your device?

[DirtyDog]

How does this work DD? I've had a brief looky and still not clear. I'm assuming it's similar to P2P/torrent seeding?

Is a portion of your 1TB allocated for storing bits of everyone else's data? Will you also have your upload speed throttled by everyone accessing their online data stored on your device?

As far as I understand it....

The drive is probably a 1.5TB or bigger, and you have a 1TB partition that you can use for your data. I think they are looking at how you can set up throttling speeds and upload limits, because not everyone has an unlimited connection. I don't know if that is available right now or not, to be honest.

When you plug it into the network, your files get encrypted and broken up into pieces which get scattered across other users, so no other user will have a complete copy of your file. Nor will they have access to your data.

The deal I'm on via Kickstarter was $129 up front, and then $10 a month after that. I lease the device for that (they have now moved people onto a deal where you own the drive outright), so if there are any problems with it, I send the drive back and they replace it.

My thinking was that if it's atrocious, then if I terminate the monthly plan, they have to pay me to send the drive back, which they probably won't bother to do

The company has had venture capital money from Google, I think.

EDIT - Kickstarter page, which has some more information in the updates about how it all works, I think.

[Platypus]

These guys were recommended to me recently

Online Backup & Data Backup Software | Backblaze

Looks cheaper than Amazon. BTW, Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 so I heard

EDIT $5 per month for unlimited storage !

[DirtyDog]

Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 so I heard

Yep - https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en

[doodab]

I think I will go with making one or two copies to external hard drives. That way I can update one copy and swap them over when my parents visit.

[SpontaneousOrder]

+1 for this as well.

I now buy all drives in pairs and RAID them. Even with external HDDs I buy them in a pair and rsync them.

The external drive I got recently (WD Duo) has 2*3tb drives with the option of using them as 2 single drives, striping them, or mirroring them.

[Pondlife]

The external drive I got recently (WD Duo) has 2*3tb drives with the option of using them as 2 single drives, striping them, or mirroring them.

By external HDDs I meant the little usb ones where RAIDing isn't really practical as I won't have them both plugged in all the time.

But yes, I have a NAS that offers the same and so I mirror them.

[eek]

Strictly speaking, you should buy the same drives from different suppliers, rather than buying in pairs. Statistically, drive failures will be more common in drives from the same batch, so you want to make sure that the drives come from different batches. This may be taking the protection thing a bit far, though

The Drobo drive was good for this - you can mix and match drives at any time, and they automatically split things out for you. Drive sizes don't need to be the same, so I have a couple of 1TB, a couple of 1.5TB and a 500GB drive in the same array.

Heard another scare stories about Drobo to run a mile from it (the idea that the only way to recover from a failed Drobo box is another Drobo box rather put me off).

I use unraid simply because it ends up with a set of reiferfs drives. The most you lose is the data on the failed drive (and even then only if multiple drives die at the same time).

Offsite storage is a different matter and I use S3 for that directly....