Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

They give me half of a 2TB drive? Doesn't that mean that I'm getting only one copy of my data stored outside my house? So if a power surge fries my equipment, there's one copy of my data spread across a couple dozen other machines. I guess that's fine as long as no one but me experiences any failures...<p>It's possible that they're just overselling, and they expect most people to use only a couple hundred megs, which would allow lots of redundancy. If so, that seems like a really bad idea, since heavy usage of an on-site disk is likely (let's back up all these pirated movies!), and their buildout requires either signing up new customers or swapping devices, neither of which is quick or cheap.

So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're effectively pushing their costs onto ISPs, who in turn will push their costs onto customers. Restoring backups is also going to be pretty slow if your data is stored on somebody's 10M/1M DSL line. They'd better market it in countries where everyone has 100M and no bandwidth caps.

This has been shown not to work: <a href="http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/TFS.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/TFS.pdf</a> (section 5.1) I wonder how they think they're getting around the upstream replication bottleneck.

Interesting idea, but this worries me:<p><i>When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It's actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system.</i><p>So 1TB is filled with other people's data? What about security? Dropbox had a simple security issue that potentially leaked all users' data. But now, the data is on your drive. You could mirror the drive ('dd') and try to break into other user's information without anyone suspecting anything.<p>Or what happens if someone stores child pr0n on SpaceMonkey, and it gets mirrored to your drive? Legally, are you now on the hook for possessing the information since it's on your device?

This is a great idea for the long term. There will always be a need for something like this, as an alternative to the cloud. Dropbox should have come up with this, to differentiate themselves from their competitors.<p>Sounds like a good acquisition candidate.

Actually, you know who could probably sell this? Comcast. Make a single device that serves as a cable modem and also has this storage angle built in as either a "free" service with the bundle or as a small upsell.

I would love to see a Time machine equivalent for Windows. I already have a 2TB storage device at home but pretty much every local backup/sync service sucks cojones. I'd gladly pay a flat fee for a product that does this

I think this is a great idea but I think Dropbox has a pretty well established brand name. My guess is that most people aren't going to find the need to switch. The ones who might make the switch are the paranoid folks who would think this is some sort of more secure way to sync.<p>The idea is nice but the challenge, IMO, will be in marketing this.

Didn't Wuala use to do something like this? Except more for P2P file backup rather than sync?

This sounds awesome! I've been waiting to see a step this direction for a long time. For a lot of people dropbox is the best tool for files, but its ridiculous for the trip between two computers in the same room to have a layover in A3.

I'm glad to see Dropbox as defining this space.

And here I thought it was an actually solid rival to dropbox you could install in your own servers and enjoy the same level of functionaly.<p>Yes I know there are some hacks around using FTP apps to get a similar experience, but is not the same, is still clunky, sometimes too buggy, and let alone the average dropbox user wouldn't be able to even read the instructions, let alone put it together.