A bit outlandish at first sight, but a very interesting idea. RAID over cloud storage services! Call it RAICS. You could even build some actual redundancy into it, just in case one of them goes down. Also add client-side encryption, and I'm in!<p>But honestly,<p>> <i>if you’re paying anyone for online storage, you’re a chump.</i><p>No. If you're not paying anyone, you're everyone's product.
The problem in using multiple services is split between pricing, limitations, and to a certain extent attack surface area.<p>If you start using lesser and lesser known services, the greater the potential threat of odd limitations (SkyDrive's 2gb file size limit, for instance), and especially apparent, a greater surface area for compromising someone's stuff. Trusting 7 companies with data, each secured with a (hopefully different) password is just too big of a risk to practically take. I'm slowly switching to Google Drive for most of my important stuff (I have my eclipse workspace in Dropbox) as a result of two factor and a proven track record of not being compromised. I keep raising the point, but Dropbox has already made this mistake once (<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20072755-281/dropbox-confirms-security-glitch-no-password-required/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20072755-281/dropbox-confi...</a>). Though they're very likely more secure as a result, I'd be hesitant to trust any company lesser known than them for security.<p>When it comes down to it, a lot more goes into choosing a space provider than just the amounts offered free - making a decision on that alone is bound to lead down troublesome paths.
The idea is not new (and certainly I'm not the only one using this since years - there must be hundreds of thousands doing it if not soon millions of users).<p>I guess integration of storage aggregation might soon be seen in various apps (if ToS of the storage services allow) as more and more apps now can make use of online storage and services like box.com, dropbox and the many others that started about 4-5 years ago have made normal computer users familiar with these concepts.<p>As mentioned again in one of the links within the article (<a href="http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbox-is-a-feature-not-a-product/" rel="nofollow">http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/26/steve-jobs-was-right-dropbo...</a> - was previously discussed here on HN) providing online storage is a feature and not a product.<p>Like with many other things before, pure-play online storage is becoming / always was a commodity service. I guess providers will continue to compete around add-on services. That can only be good for consumers of these services.
Could try SMEstorage. I think they have an "aggregation" concept like this.<p>I think this article misses the point of the these new cloud solutions though. I'm not a fan of aggregation.<p>The next big stage of cloud storage is integration. Integration into 3rd party apps. Integration deep into devices (iCloud for iOS and Google Drive for Android). Coupling them together will miss the biggest advantage of cloud storage.