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Show HN: Unlimited Free Backup For Life (built in HTML5)

thirsty.com

15 pointsgokuknows32 comments

I need to write a bot that posts this every time a new free online storage sites pop up on HN:

The only compelling aspect of the offering is the promise of free storage. I don't see a dollar sign anywhere on the site, so I don't understand how they intend to keep that promise for very long. I refuse to sign up for a product, much less take the time to integrate it into my workflow, without knowing that it will be around for longer than a few months.

Hey Martin, We are planning to stay alive for 100 years this is a very long term play. We are planning to kill the OS by letting users execute any file type in the cloud: PSDs, AI, you name it, open, edit, save and publish. The way we will make money is from enterprise (which we got already some clients) and from apps that will be built on top of Thirsty. We don't believe that people should be charged for backup because it complicates things: data plans, pricing, data transfers etc all this is just confusing to most users. We make it simple it's free that's it. This is our first day launching we will be adding some awesome features in the upcoming weeks. Thank you for the feedback.

That's great and all.

Who pays your bills in the next 12 months?

Better question: Who paid for thirsty.com? Dictionary words are not cheap.

Those are some lofty goals. Good luck.

How will you sustain a "free storage" site without any income? Surely you must be charging someone for something.

If not, it leads me to believe you might do something with our data to make money. I don't want to jump to conclusions, so it might be a better idea if you just tell us how you plan to capitalize on the service before we upload our content!

I am not making any money from your data. We make money from the enterprise and it will stay that way, we don't charge consumers and wont charge in the future.

What does HTML5 have to do with Cloud Backup? Does it use localStorage or something? ;)

We use HTML5 drag and drop so that you don't need to install any software to upload your data.

No privacy policy or terms of use, and you expect me to send you my data?

Just fixed sorry we forgot to add it to the home page, it was inside the account.

While the footer on the why_us page now includes the TOS and Privacy links, the main page does not have that.

Also, your blog link is dead.

Also, while not logged in, if I go to the why_us page, there is a search bar available to be used at the top of the screen. However, I am unable to really interact with it in any meaningful way.

In your TOS, you refer to the privacy page as being at: http://www.Thirsty.com/t/privacy. However, that is not where it is located.

This segment of your TOS is nonsensical: "The above licenses granted by you in video Content you submit to the Service terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your videos from the Service"

And just curious, the last line of their TOS is that they are enforcing a statute of limitations of 1 year on any actions that you would want to take against them. Are we actually able to give up that right in a contract / TOS?

First reactions:

1) "Create and discover hard drives" => "huh? what on earth does that mean?"

2) "Share, make them password protected or open them up for others to add to it" => I'm no closer to understanding what your product does.

3) Enter your email, enter your password => I don't know what this is, why it exists, I don't have an account, and you can't have my email address.

If you're going to get that information from me, you're going to have to spell out in understandable terms what problems you're solving.

And, although everybody else has said it: nobody believes "unlimited and free forever". Doesn't particularly matter if you've found a way to do it, it's not credible. And the "available gigabytes" thing at the bottom is obviously fake, lending to the overall feeling of impending bait-and-switch.

Can't beat a quote like this from the creator: "We are planning to stay alive for 100 years this is a very long term play. We are planning to kill the OS by letting users execute any file type in the cloud"

I think not, but thanks anyway.

I do like how your "available gigabytes" counter is simply the current time with some division and sub stringing involved .. \o/

$('span#available_space').text(addCommas(((date.getTime()/2500).toFixed(2)).substring(1,12)))

I'd like an explanation of the service that doesn't require signing up.

Hey sorry about that you can check out more about the product here: http://thirsty.com/why_us email me at: michaelabehsera@gmail.com if you have any questions would love to help :)

If it's not too much to ask, who is paying for all that free space ?

I just signed up, created a room, named it, tagged it, uploaded a file to it and saved it. Now I have no idea how to find that room. Tried searching for it, nothing happens. This looked promising and then... it just falls flat.

You can see it in the footer, sorry we just launched today and we are only 2 engineers trying our best to fix everything asap. Tell me if you see it in the footer. Btw it is free back up for life and its safe, so your files are there no worries, tell me if you would like anything else to improve your exp you can email me at michael@thirsty.com if you need any help with something.

Thanks for the quick response. I now see the room in the footer. I clicked it and my file is nowhere to be found...

An app for Chrome OS/iOS etc would be avery good idea. Their users don't have a filesystem(or are kept unaware of it) and so they might take to it much quicker. Just a thought.

Your blog is full of the most unrelated posts that I've ever seen.

http://blog.thirsty.com/page/2/

Cannot upload large files ??? I have some MKVs I would like to backup and it's not letting me upload (8gb file)

We just launched today, technically you can we are soon releasing an update that will let you upload any size file. for now the limit is 5GBs. Do you have smaller files you can upload would love for you to test it and give us feedback.

Ok, thanks for the feedback !

Also, the search bar on the "why us" page does nothing. Also, I'm not really sure what you do still.

Do you have any plans to release a bash client to upload files? I'd love to use crontab to backup my new files.

Thanks

that's an awesome idea :D. I'll put it on our todo list ^^

You must charge. Otherwise, there is a risk important data will be lost if you go out of business.

I'd prefer the header to be fixed and not the footer, or at least both.

Anyone remember backify?

Yeah, I do too. I lost all of my data after all of their accounts got closed (luckily I wasn't relying on my backups here).

This sort of service cannot be sustained and I can't trust it with any important data. I know you say that you are different, but I've seen it too many times before.

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