One device, 1TB of personal cloud storage
spacemonkey.com
spacemonkey.com
SpaceMonkey's features are at best rudimentary and only usable as a personal cloud storage. Don't even think about working in a team (to be fair, the team is working on sharing features).
The device used huge amount of bandwidth and made the network in my coworking space unusable.
So today I can only recommend to look into a different solution …
I had to disconnect it months ago and the device has been stored since then.
In my own home, I'm on the slowest DSL tier that my provider offers, and only have 700kbps upstream. Space Monkey works fine here, and I can still do dual Netflix streams while it is running. Some users will have to manually adjust their bandwidth settings in environments like this.
This is in part due to factors that we have some control over and can tweak to allows less capable links to make progress (and we're hard at work on this) and partly due just to plain old physics: if you want to be able to push N GBs of data to the network, with some redundancy factor R, and allowing for self-healing of locations that may leave the network due to failure or otherwise H, and also allow some amount of access from other devices in the cooperative network, in some given timeframe T, there's some math that indicates how much bandwidth is needed theoretically, even with everything optimized.
The good news is, I believe we have some wiggle room here to optimize out still.
Since then, SpaceMonkey got acquired... which I find fascinating.
http://www.qnap.com/i/useng/app_center/con_show.php?op=showo...
Support for S3 and Glacier is built in and very easy to configure. It's not a major issue if you have a RAID setup because it's less likely you will have to restore from backup. I've only had single drives go bad and I hotswapped them. I would feel much differently if I had a single drive unit.
DSM 4: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToSetUpCrashPlanCloudBackup...
DSM 5: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UPDATED2014HowToSetupCrashPlan...
https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+crashplan+not+Worki...
It is a hack. There should be an official release from Crashplan or Synology. Same for the other big backup cloud providers. If there was something better and supported on Synology than Amazon S3 or Glacier, I'd personally be prepared to get my wallet out. These companies are missing a big market of Synology owners who are desperate for an alternative, and no I don't want to use HiDrive.
We have recently delivered shared folder functionality via the web client, and are working on shared folders for the desktop as well. I've been personally using a beta version of desktop shared folders for collaboration for over a year. We want to make sure we nail this experience before releasing it more broadly.
Thanks for backing us early on! Hope you might give us another look at some point in the future.
If you are going to throw out this statement please give specifics: Did they miss milestones? Did they promise certain features and not deliver on them?
A specific problem is that the ability to copy files with LAN speed to the device turned out to be true only for small files. If you have gigabytes of files you can mount it as a network drive in linux and have around 32MB/s write speed.
On Windows and Mac the client will cache files in a temp folder and copy the to the device. So you can't just unplug your laptop and leave immediately but have to wait for the sync to finish … that is some functionality they promised in the kickstarter campaign.
And I experienced problems with the offline mode where you are supposed to use the SpaceMonkey network to retrieve your files if your device is offline. This didn't work in my case.
Very confusing, and that took maybe 20 seconds to find.
Plan A: buy the device upfront and own it. Price includes 1 year of network backup service. After the first year, if you want to continue the network backup, it's $49/year ($4/month).
Plan B: don't pay anything upfront for the device and lease it plus the service for $10/month for as long as you like.
Plan A is the only service available directly from the website currently, and we need to clarify the copy on the webpage -- thanks for pointing out to confusion.
First thing I read: $49/year. Last thing I read: $10/month. No further clarifications. Not something that evokes trust, esp. when backers are saying they've been shouting about this for months. Even in stating "Plan A: buy the device upfront and own it" - ok, how much is that?
There is also Pogoplug [1] which is a superior idea IMHO: the user provides his own USB hard drive(s). This reduces the price of the device and gives more space flexibility: you can connect any size and any number(!) of drives via a USB hub. There is another company doing something similar to Pogoplug, but I cannot remember their name at the moment. Of course the downside of Pogoplug is that there is no backup. But for my own needs, I would prefer Pogoplug's trade-off (unlimited storage & no backup & no constant Internet traffic) compared to Space Monkey (1TB limit & automatic backup & constant ~400kbit/s of traffic background to the SpaceMonkey distributed network).
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2910802/pogoplug-series-4-r... (I link to a review because the company's main website does not do a good job of describing the product: http://pogoplug.com/devices)
Some q&a I had with their co-founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996053 (parent discussion mostly about an alleged kickstarter scam)
While the fragmented/distributed backup approach is cool and useful some people might not like paying $50 for the privilege of seeding other people's files with their bandwidth.
Obviously if it's phrased like I'm paying to have other people use my bandwidth, that's a big issue.
"Oh, its not wireless"
"And not a speaker."
Because of the way data is encrypted, the system supports sharing at the file and folder level without granting access to other data in a user's filesystem.
Does it support Linux?
I'd say sherlybox is a better deal
a top end pogo plug with a 3TB drive would be cheaper and more capable (usb3.0/sd card/user choice in HDD), or you can save fifty bucks if you don't need multi-user support.