With Plug, Create A Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox With Your USB Drives

Here&#x27;s their Kickstarter: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cloud-guys&#x2F;plug-the-brai...</a><p>They mention in the &quot;The Tech&quot; section that they&#x27;re doing a VPN between the &quot;Plug&quot; and clients and that they&#x27;ve gotten it to punch thru &quot;any main NAT &amp; firewall we tested&quot; and further say &quot;it&#x27;s decentralized when possible&quot; but don&#x27;t go into any more specifics. I&#x27;d like to know what their mechanism is for resolving the Plug&#x27;s public IP address. Presumably they&#x27;ll be running some dynamic DNS servers or some proprietary location protocol but since they make a point of saying they&#x27;re not a subscription service I am immediately dubious as to how they plan to continue to finance running those servers.<p>This entire class of products just makes me sad. It would be really neat to live in a world where the bandwidth (and lack of transfer quotas) actually existed that would permit us to take advantage of the exceedingly cheap large storage devices that we can purchase and put on our home and business networks. I don&#x27;t see that world existing any time soon, at least in the United States.

From their Kickstarter: &quot;With Plug, we invented a technology to transfer files instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number.&quot;<p>I hate to see an interesting project make silly claims like that. Whatever the truth of the matter is, it won&#x27;t match what they seem to be implying.

How is this similar to or different from PogoPlug? <a href="http://pogoplug.com/devices" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pogoplug.com&#x2F;devices</a>

Not sure how this is better than BitTorrent Sync <a href="http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;labs.bittorrent.com&#x2F;experiments&#x2F;sync.html</a>.<p>BTSync runs on many NASes, and $40 Raspberry Pi.

Looks in some way similar in concept of File Transporter from Connected Data:<p><a href="http://www.filetransporter.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filetransporter.com</a>

Reminds me of Pogoplug.

If it&#x27;s true that they&#x27;ve gotten it to punch thru any main NAT &amp; firewall they&#x27;ve tested it&#x27;s already ahead of Bitcasa, who STILL hasn&#x27;t added proxy settings to their client.

What is the advantage over dropbox? My dropbox app already automagically uploads photos taken from my phone. Am I missing something?

Does Plug provide any redundancy or &quot;RAID&quot; like features?

Wait, so I have to keep my computer ON (the one which has this USB device connected) and I am supposed to feel I am using Dropbox?<p>I could do a whole lot more if I could keep one of my computer ON 24x7x365 without using a $69 device.

how different it is from TonidoPlug? TonidoPlug also provides personal cloud sync.